The March Featured Writer is John C. Adams

Please feel free to email John at johnadamssf@hotmail.com

IN THE FORTUNE TELLER’S TENT
by John C. Adams

Aunt Veneria was waiting for us on the steps of Slimeport Manse, flanked by two stone griffins. She appeared anxious as she led us inside the dark, forbidding house. A skinny young man in a black suit stood in the hallway, gazing up at the portrait of Uncle Augustus above the fireplace. I forced myself to shake hands. My husband Brett eyed him with disdain.

“Professor Graham Tinea, at your service,” the skinny man told us.

I shrank back. Brett put his hand around my waist and drew me closer to him. Tinia seemed far too young to be a real professor. He rubbed his greasy hands and spread them out palm upwards towards me. His long fingers were feminine and pale. I found him utterly repellent.

“I intend to make a memorable fortune teller at the fete,” Tinea said. “Quite a change from my work at Lancaster Asylum. I know exactly what tonight holds for you, Radclyffe Flint.”

Tinia looked me up and down. A sly smile crept across his face. I was wearing a black flowery dress with short frilly sleeves and a thick black ribbon neckline. I’d matched it with black silk court shoes and pinned my hair into an up-do I thought might impress the townsfolk of Slimeport. For once, I looked nothing like a farmer’s wife.

I folded my arms across my chest and scowled at Tinia, but Brett pushed past him, putting his shoulder into it and almost knocking him off his feet. “Fortune tellers aren’t very exciting,” my husband spoke over his shoulder.

“Professor Tinia will be participating in our fair, so we should make him feel welcome,” Aunt Veneria said as she hurriedly showed us out into the gardens.

A squall had blown in off the sea. The volunteers were fighting to erect a black marquee that had a life of its own, shouting to each other as the guy-ropes were tightened and the pegs hammered into the ground. Black lanterns with candles lit inside hung from chains spread between the oak trees.

Countess Philippa was tussling with a two-headed pony. The vicar’s wife was setting up the Pin the Tail on the Dragon stall. The dragon was only a juvenile but it was feisty.

The vicar was dropping prizes into a ship’s barrel filled with live worms. Next to him was a table selling homemade treats for the kids: wriggling scorpions impaled on sticks, doughnuts with locusts fried inside them, packets of roasted crickets.

Aunt Veneria and I wandered past two men from Slimeport Town setting up the coconut shy. Rows of cuddly purple octopi were stacked behind the counter. Two men were placing shriveled heads onto cups mounted on sticks, and customers were supposed to throw rocks at them. One of the heads winked at me. I hit the head square in the face and it swayed but didn’t fall. The head cackled at me. I picked up a second rock, hit the head harder and it dropped to the ground.

Brett grabbed my hand and said, “Your aunt made me promise I’d take you to the fortune teller’s tent. Let’s get this over with.”

He and I walked hand-in-hand to the tent. As we approached, a young woman ran out of it, her face tearstained, and she was dragging her cardigan back over her shoulders. She stared into my eyes and grabbed my wrist. Her face was white and she was shaking. “Don’t go inside!”

Brett disentangled the girl’s fingers from my arm and we slipped inside the tent. Professor Tinia was skulking in the gloom at the back like a giant spider. There was none of the flamboyant tastelessness a self-respecting clairvoyant brings to their costume. By his appearance, he could have been a schoolteacher or a stockbroker.

Tinia spread his hands across his crystal ball. He wore an expression of sly smugness that I found disconcerting. There was an emptiness behind his eyes that spoke of traumas long buried in hidden memories. This was not the greasy psychiatrist who’d made it his hobby to research how monsters had crawled up out of the sea all along our North West coast. It was like staring at a different person and wondering what aeons of horror had gone into the making of those eyes. No wonder the girl had been so scared.

I moved closer to my husband and leaned against him. Brett put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulder.

Tinia spoke. “Let’s see what the future holds for you.”

“I’m going to serve a lengthy prison sentence after strangling a charlatan at my aunt’s fair,” Brett snapped. “It’ll be worth it.”

“I was talking to your wife.”

Ignoring his crystal ball, Tinia reached out and took my right hand. With a wary glance over at Brett, I let him do so. His touch was cold and clammy, his fingers like icicles. He turned my hand over and stared at my palm. He drew his index finger along a line across my skin. It tickled but I shivered as he touched me.

“I see a great darkness enveloping your life,” Tinia began.

Dark storm clouds hung over the fair. The waves were crashing at the rocks and sending up spray that drenched part of the lawns. The stench of salt became overwhelming and I could hear people screaming in amusement as they were getting soaked.

I felt that things lurked at Slimeport of which I had no comprehension. It was like the ocean was climbing up onto land and invading our lives.

Tinia stared intently at my hand. He leaned over so that his face was only inches from me.

“Evil will breach your borders at Slimeport Manse tonight. You will love the child that results more than you have ever loved anything. It will compensate for the double wrong done to you when your husband fathered twins with his mistress. How forgiving of you to raise them now she’s lying in the hellhole churchyard.”

Brett jumped up and his chair tumbled to the ground. “How dare you! Shut your filthy mouth or I will shut it for you permanently.”

My husband grabbed my hand and pulled me out of my chair so violently that I felt my elbow temporarily dislocate. Brett put a hand in the small of my back and guided me towards the tent flap. He ushered me across the lawns towards the house.

The panic that had been rising inside me while we’d been inside the tent was gaining traction on my psyche. I felt the grip of anxiety strangling me. Once we reached the porch, I collapsed and Brett swung me up into his arms and carried me into the manse. He strode past Aunt Veneria and brushed her  concerned enquiries aside.

My husband took me upstairs and laid me down upon our bed. I felt the darkness of sleep overpower me and I gave myself up to it.

*****

When I woke, it was dark outside and Brett was sitting in a chair by the wall, wearing his night clothes and staring out of the window towards the sea. He turned around when he heard me stirring. There was something about the look on his usually stolid farmer’s face: a sort of haunted expression that surprised me. It was like looking at a man who has had evil burrow down into his soul and make a home there.

Brett slipped into bed beside me. We lay for a while without speaking. I couldn’t rid myself of the memory of the haunted look on his face.

“I will protect you. Go to sleep. Nothing will attack you while I stand guard.”

I woke up in the middle of the night to feel a cool breeze wafting through the open, full-length windows. I got out of bed and went to close them. I stared out at the black sea, at the waves crashing against the rocks beneath Slimeport Manse.

The moon was full and reflected off the water. As I looked out at the waves, I was sure I could see glimpses of shadows rising up out of the waters. The shadows had long tentacles that seemed to wrap around the cliffs and up over the top onto the manse’s manicured lawns. The shapes were black and shiny.

The octopi started crawling up the sheer cliffs and across the lawns towards the manse. Their yellow eyes shone in the moonlight.

I grabbed the velvet curtains and flung them closed; their rings rattled against the pole. I backed away from the window, terrified that the creatures would come for me just as Tinia had promised.

The room was pitch black and I began to imagine shapes materializing in the far corners. I ran back to bed and leaped in. I clamped my eyes shut. Brett put his arms round me and cuddled into me.

“I saw something outside,” I told him.

“You’ve had a stressful day. I told you I would watch over you,” he said. “Relax, nothing is out there.”

Was he right? Of course he was right. I relaxed into his embrace. But then I felt my thoughts race with images of a little girl. Not a human girl, not exactly. Something slippery with tentacles kept invading my mind.

I felt heavy as a terror settled upon my chest. I heard once that this was what a heart attack felt like. I lay, stiff and afraid, next to my husband. Eventually, I could hear his breathing soften with sleep.

It was what I was waiting for. I got up and went downstairs through the silent brooding manse. I heard the front door bang and someone laughing. I was wandering back towards the main staircase when I saw a shadow flit across the entrance hall and then move down the corridor towards the conservatory.

I called after it. I waited but no one answered, then I heard a muffled cough behind me. Heart racing, I flew around to find Tinia standing at the foot of the stairs.

“You frightened me!” I cried and stared at him in horror.

He was barely recognizable as the same man we’d met yesterday. His clothes were sopping wet, making his lanky frame even more skinny than usual. His black hair was plastered back and his grey eyes had a haunted, shadowy look. Down the right side of his face there were bloody, open wounds, small bites that had sunk right into his cheek and close to his eye.

I started to back away from him, slowly moving up the stairs.

A crafty smiled played across Tinia’s lips. He looked me up and down suggestively and winked at me. “Hurry back to your faithful husband, Radclyffe.”

I sprinted upstairs and tried to wake Brett but he was in such a deep sleep that I couldn’t rouse him.

I ran down the corridor to Aunt Veneria’s room and pounded on her door. I waited outside, pressing my ear to the wood and wondering whether she’d taken a heavier sleeping draught than normal. Eventually, she came to the door, bleary-eyed and with her hair standing on end. She stretched and yawned and muttered something about never having slept so deeply. I ushered her along the corridor and together we woke Brett.

Tinia came into our room. He’d changed into black silk pajamas and a claret-colored dressing gown. Somehow his face had healed and the skin was perfectly smooth and white. I shot a look of pure hatred at the man. He was, as Brett had said earlier, a complete charlatan.

I told my aunt everything that had happened downstairs and in the tent. Tinia stood by and shook his head indulgently while I was talking.

Brett jumped out of bed. “I’m going to do what I promised!” He punched Tinia so hard that he fell against one of the bedposts and smacked his head. As he lost consciousness, I could see his injuries return and the fish bites were plain to see.

“Call a doctor!” Aunt Veneria cried.

“Call a mortician for all I care,” Brett answered. He grabbed my hand. “Come on, Radclyffe, let’s get out of here.”

He dragged me to the guest bedroom. I could tell by his expression that the violence had aroused him. I had been considering leaving him for months now. Over time, he seemed to have slipped into something dark, something evil.

As my husband pulled me into the guest bed, the crack of dawn peeked through the window. Then it darkened and I saw a grey mist begin to blow in under the door. It began to grow in strength until it billowed out and filled the room.

The cloud condensed into the black shape of an octopus and came towards me. It rose above me. I was paralyzed as it seemed to merge with Brett. I knew deep in my soul that, as Tinia had promised, I would conceive a child tonight.

John C. Adams was long-listed for the Aeon Award in 2012 and 2013. She is currently a trainee submissions reader with Albedo One magazine. You can read more of her short fiction in anthologies from Sinister Saints Press, Erebus Press and Rogue Planet Press, in recent issues of Schlock! Webzine, Devolution Z magazine and Farther Stars than These ezine, or for free online at her website HERE

She lives in Edinburgh, UK, with her husband and family, and is a non-practicing solicitor.