This Isn't What It Looks Like

  “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault,” said Cass, miserable. “I should never have eaten the chocolate. Now, instead of me having the lodestone, Lord Pharaoh does!”

  “Don’t blame yourself. You did what you had to do,” said Owen, not exactly contradicting her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, you guys try to find out which way Lord Pharaoh went. But do not, I repeat, DO NOT go after him, do you hear me?”

  “Why not?” asked Yo-Yoji. “He was going after me.”

  “Yeah, that’s my point. I’m the guy who’s always ready to throw you into the deep end, so if I’m telling you to stay away, there’s gotta be a good reason, right?”

  “You know, I have met Lord Pharaoh before,” Cass couldn’t help saying.

  “Was he a ghost at the time? Whose powers we don’t even know? If he’s out of his armor now, he could be anywhere and we wouldn’t see him. He could be in this very room.”

  Cass glanced around through the monocle. “He’s not.”

  “Well, there’s some good news at least!” Throwing his rucksack over his shoulder, Owen walked out the door.

  “How do we figure out where Lord Pharaoh went if we don’t go after him?” asked Yo-Yoji after Owen had disappeared. “Just follow his tracks out of here, then stop?”

  “I doubt we’ll even get that far. He’s a ghost. For all we know, his horse is a ghost, too, and it won’t leave any tracks,” said Max-Ernest. “Hey, what are you doing here, Ben?”

  At some point while they were talking, Benjamin had walked in. He tugged on Max-Ernest’s sleeve and started mumbling.

  “He says he has an idea where we could look for Lord Pharaoh,” Max-Ernest translated.

  “How do you know about Lord Pharaoh?” asked Cass angrily. “Have you been eavesdropping?”

  “He’s still spying for them, I knew it!” said Yo-Yoji.

  Benjamin shook his head over and over.

  Max-Ernest translated again. “He says he just wants to help. He feels terrible about what he did and wants to make it up to us.”

  “OK, so how’re you helping, Ben?” demanded Cass.

  “He says the camera obscura is located on the highest point in the area. He stayed there after the rest of the school left and noticed you can see all of Ren-Faire and even outside of it. Maybe we’ll be able to see Lord Pharaoh from there…. Actually, not a bad idea, Ben.”

  A faint smile lit Benjamin’s face.

  Minus the crowd of students, the camera obscura had a calmer, more contemplative quality—like a museum or a library.

  The screen did indeed offer a sweeping, panoramic view of the Renaissance Faire but, alas, only of one side of the faire.

  “Lord Pharaoh could be riding past us right now, but we can’t see him because this hole is pointed in the wrong direction,” Max-Ernest complained.

  “Maybe we should get out of here, start asking around. Somebody must have seen which way he went,” said Yo-Yoji. “What do you say, Cass?”

  “Just a sec,” said Cass, taking out the Double Monocle. “I think I just saw something.”

  At first, when she looked at the image on the wall through the monocle, not much looked different. There were no signs of Lord Pharaoh that she could see, on horseback or off, in armor or out of it. But there was one jester hat that couldn’t help grabbing her attention—despite her best efforts to ignore all the jester hats at the faire. The point wasn’t that it looked so much like the Jester’s hat (although it did). The point wasn’t even that the man wearing the hat looked so much like the Jester (although he did). The point was that this particular hat, as well as the man wearing it, was only visible when she looked through the monocle. Three times she removed the monocle to check, and three times the man disappeared from her sight. And yet when she raised the monocle to her eye, he looked just as clear and present as anybody else who crossed her path.

  Her ears flushed with excitement. It was the Jester. Her Jester. In her world. Just… upside down.

  As above, so below, she thought, remembering the upside-down jester in her last tarot card reading.

  The Seer had told her to follow the Jester. Is this what she meant? Or was Cass just seeing things? Maybe the Jester isn’t really there at all, she thought, and my head is re-creating him from memory. Then again, her entire journey into the past had—in a sense—been in her head. It was all so confusing!

  The sound of a cell phone ringing brought Cass’s attention back into the room.

  Max-Ernest took his phone out of his pocket and looked at the number, befuddlement on his face. “Who do you think it is?” he asked his friends. “The only people that ever call me are you guys. Unless it’s about my brother…?”

  Nervous, he clicked on.

  “Hi, Max-Ernest, it’s Daniel.”

  “Who?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then, through gritted teeth, “Daniel-not-Danielle.”

  “Oh! Uh, hi.”

  Daniel-not-Danielle spoke in a rush. “I didn’t know who else to call. I didn’t want to call the principal or anybody—just in case, well, Glob said he ditched the camera obscura and I didn’t want to get him into more trouble.”

  “You’re calling ’cause he ditched?”

  “No, no, it’s ’cause of what he wrote on his blog.”

  “I thought you were at that comic book thing,” said Max-Ernest, confused.

  “I was. I got home early and went online.”

  Daniel-not-Danielle proceeded to tell Max-Ernest all about Glob’s blog posts (omitting the part where Glob makes fun of Daniel-not-Danielle as well as the part where he complains about Max-Ernest), right up to the part where Glob sees what looks like a ghost drinking from a cup.

  Max-Ernest put his hand over the phone and whispered to the others: “Glob saw Lord Pharaoh—I think the Midnight Sun might have him!”

  Into the phone, he asked: “Where’s the last place he said he was?”

  Then, to the others: “He crossed some dry river-bed and he’s supposedly hiding in a cave now. Unless they got him… There’s no riverbed around here, is there?”

  While Max-Ernest was speaking, Cass was watching the Jester cross just such a riverbed. In the past, she might have found the coincidence remarkable, but she was getting very used to seeing the story-lines of her life overlap and converge.

  “I know where it is—I think I know where he went,” she said, not mentioning the Jester. She was reluctant to tell her friends about him, still fearing what would happen if they knew about her visions.

  “If you find him, do me a favor,” said Daniel-not-Danielle. “Tell him he shouldn’t call himself ‘the Globster’—it’s embarrassing.”

  “I think that’s supposed to be a pun,” said Max-Ernest helpfully. “You know, lobster/Globster.”

  By the time Max-Ernest got off the phone, his friends were already out the door.

  “Are you sure this is where to go?” asked Max-Ernest about ten minutes later. “We’re getting kind of far away from Ren-Faire.”

  Cass didn’t answer, just kept leading them farther into the woods. Holding the monocle up to her eye, she looked like a particularly determined naturalist chasing after a rare species of butterfly.

  Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji were a bit mystified that Cass was so certain about the direction they were heading, but they weren’t about to let her continue on her own, not with her having woken up so recently from a coma, not with the Midnight Sun and the ghost of Lord Pharaoh lurking about.

  “Is anybody else hungry?” asked Yo-Yoji.

  “I am,” said Max-Ernest. “And I’m all out of chocolate!”

  Not stopping, Cass felt around in a side pocket of her backpack, pulled out a plastic baggie full of her trademark super-chip trail mix, and tossed it over her shoulder.

  Her friends greedily ransacked the baggie, Max-Ernest extracting as many of the chocolate chips as he could. (Luckily, it was not a hot day and the chocolate chips hadn’t melted yet.)

>   “Hey, I think that might be the boulder Glob hid under,” said Max-Ernest. “He said it was shaped like a hamburger.”

  Yo-Yoji called out to Cass, who was getting farther and farther ahead. “Wait up, Cass! We found the boulder!”

  “You guys check it out, I’ll meet you back there!”

  Before they could argue, she disappeared behind a tree.

  The Jester was still a good thirty or forty feet ahead of her. Whenever she got too close, he would speed up. When she lagged too far behind, he would slow down. Because the monocle refused to stay in her eye socket, she had to hold it up. Whenever she needed her hand to move brush or leaves aside, she had to remove the monocle—meaning often as not she couldn’t see the Jester. But he was always there when she looked through the monocle again. It was if they were connected by an invisible thread that might slacken or tighten but would never snap.

  Eventually, he stopped and let her come much closer.

  “Hi,” she said shyly.

  He put his finger to his lips to shush her. Then pointed ahead to where the path ended at a large oak tree.

  He smiled at her. Then he vanished.

  She felt suddenly very sad and bereft. Why hadn’t he spoken? Why had he led her all the way out here only to disappear?

  She ran to the oak tree and saw that on the other side of it was a dirt road not unlike the one she had walked on in the beginning of her journey into the past. Up ahead was a small gas station. It looked old, abandoned.

  Then she saw him. Not the Jester. Lord Pharaoh.

  Correction: then she saw where he was. She couldn’t see Lord Pharaoh himself.

  He had taken off his helmet, and his seemingly empty suit of armor appeared to be sitting astride his horse all by itself.

  Just as she raised the monocle to her eye, he looked up and saw her. His face was now visible to Cass, but hardly more alive. He looked even emptier inside than he had before.

  Cass felt her ears prickling with fear. Be brave, she told herself. The Jester wouldn’t have led you to him if he didn’t think you were strong enough to face him.

  Lord Pharaoh broke into an ugly smile. “Cassandra, is it? They tell me that is your name. It suits you—the bearer of bad news. I knew when I first met you that you would be a blot on the future.”

  The ancient alchemist dismounted. “I hear from my… what shall I call them?… my modern-day colleagues that you are a terrible pest.”

  Off the horse, he was no less imposing; he towered over Cass when he reached her.

  She took a step backward—and found herself up against a tree.

  “If you’re talking about Dr. L and Ms. Mauvais, they… they wish I was just a pest,” Cass stammered, trying to sound much tougher than she felt. “Did they tell you that every time they tried to stop me, I stopped them?”

  “They told me enough!”

  He gripped her shoulder with his cold, steel-clad hand. She shrank from his touch but could not wriggle free.

  “Now is your chance to make up for your sins and those of your ancestors.”

  “My ancestors?” Cass managed to whisper.

  She didn’t know whether it was due to his ghostly state or to some other alchemical trick, but she could feel Lord Pharaoh’s supernatural strength. She had no doubt he could strangle her with a single hand.

  “That infernal jester. And that heathen bandit-woman. Do you not know what they did?”

  Cass shook her head. It was all she could do not to cry.

  Lord Pharaoh shook his free fist in fury. “I was this close to getting my hands on the Secret, this close—”

  “But you never found it?” Cass fervently hoped this was the case.

  “Oh yes, I did—I found it!” said Lord Pharaoh, enraged. “Those tomb robbers who dug it up didn’t know what they had—ignorant thieves! I came to them about a small statue of the goddess Mut. When I saw that torn piece of papyrus, I forgot all about the statue. I knew right away that it was worth more than all the gold in all the tombs in Egypt. On the back were hieroglyphics that could change the course of history.”

  “The Secret?”

  “Yes, the Secret, you little fool… Before I could translate a single hieroglyphic, those sniveling scavengers snatched the papyrus away from me. They could see how much I wanted it and kept demanding more and more money. Until I had no choice but to have those vermin exterminated.”

  “You killed them?” asked Cass, horrified.

  “A minor detail. The important thing was for me to fulfill my destiny. You see, I was—I am—the only man on Earth capable of understanding the Secret. I who have studied all the ancient arts. I who have mastered alchemy like no man before or since. I who have made life with my own hands—”

  “But the Jester got the Secret first?” Cass guessed.

  “He and that thieving woman—confound them! They ambushed my manservant moments before he was to deliver the papyrus to my doorstep. Imagine, Lord Pharaoh foiled by a pathetic comedian and his wife!”

  Cass nearly smiled, realizing that this meant the Jester and Anastasia had married, but her face remained frozen.

  “Naturally, my servant paid with his life. Now, unless you want to pay with yours, you will tell me how this rock works.”

  He dangled the lodestone in front of Cass. It was the first time she’d seen it up close. As Max-Ernest had noticed previously, it was shaped like an eye and had a vein of gold running through it. It spun around. The back of the pendant was polished silver and it flashed in the sun.

  “A lodestone attracts metal, yes, but what use is that to me? If I grind it into a powder, will a spirit rise? If I crack it open, will I find a pearl? The gold thread that runs through the stone, is that the key? I thought perhaps your jester would have left a message on the back, but the back is smooth as glass. It’s like a mirror, but you remember what it is to be a ghost; I cannot even see my own reflection in it.”

  He closed his fist around the lodestone.

  “What is the lodestone’s secret? Where is the Secret?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Cass truthfully.

  Then she remembered what the homunculus had said about Lord Pharaoh. His weakness is vanity. Show him a mirror and you will gain a minute.

  “But I can show you your reflection in it.”

  “How?” His tone remained sour, but she could tell his curiosity was piqued.

  “Hand me the stone and I’ll show you.”

  Lord Pharaoh hesitated only briefly. “If you try to run off with it, I will find you, and I will destroy you.”

  “I know,” Cass assured him, although she knew nothing of the kind.

  As soon as Lord Pharaoh dropped the lodestone in her hand, she felt it pulling toward the monocle. The stone fit snuggly within the rim of the monocle, almost as if their dimensions were designed to match. Cass quickly glanced through the monocle to confirm you could see through to the reflective silver surface on the back of the stone, then she held it up for Lord Pharaoh to see.

  “Ah, what an obvious trick. I’m almost disappointed.”

  Although Cass could no longer see Lord Pharaoh’s face—to her naked eye, he was invisible again—if she craned her neck she could see his reflection through the lens of the monocle. Despite his dismissive words, he was gazing steadily at his own image. The homunculus had been right about him. Lord Pharaoh was very vain. Even as a ghost.

  “Here in your time, I would be over five hundred years old. And yet I look like a young man, do I not?”

  Cass thought he looked like an old snake, but she didn’t think it necessary to say so. “Definitely. I’ve never seen anybody with eyes like yours.” (That last part was true at least.)

  “Oh, don’t try to flatter me,” said Lord Pharaoh, but you could tell he was pleased.

  Cass had to think quickly. She had only two potential weapons on hand: the monocle and the lodestone. Given the choice, of course, there was one she would much prefer to keep: the one that would lead her to th
e Secret.

  “Now watch this—if you pull the monocle farther away from your eye, it kind of catches the light,” she said, improvising.

  “What are you showing me?” asked Lord Pharaoh, irritated to have his reflection pulled away from him.

  “Just keep looking at your reflection—”

  In one motion, Cass grabbed the lodestone with her left hand while reaching back and then forward with her right, throwing the monocle as hard as she could in the direction, she hoped, of his forehead.

  From her vantage point, it looked as though the monocle stopped in midair.

  “Ow—what are you doing, you little rat?!”

  Lord Pharaoh caught the monocle as it dropped.

  It stopped him for only a second. But it was enough time for her to start running.

  Glob was fine—once Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji had given him a few handfuls of trail mix, that is. He’d been hiding in the cave for over two hours, terrified but safe.

  “Is it just ’cause I’m so hungry, or is this really good?” asked Glob, his mouth full of Cass’s trademark combination of chocolate chips, peanut-butter chips, potato chips, and banana chips (and no raisins ever). “I usually hate trail mix. It’s so… healthy.”

  “Don’t worry, Cass’s isn’t very healthy,” said Max-Ernest. “Everything in it’s either fried or has sugar.”

  “Oh good. That makes me feel better,” said Glob, taking another handful. “I wonder if Cass would want to sell bags of it through my blog. Or maybe she would license the recipe? I know a lot of really good marketing people. It’s all about branding. And with my reader base—”

  “I doubt it, but you could always ask,” said Max-Ernest, cutting him off.

  Yo-Yoji held up his hand. “Quiet, dudes. Listen. I think that’s her….”

  A second later, they heard Cass screaming their names.

  “Max-Ernest! Yo-Yoji! Where are you?!”

  They pulled themselves out of the cave just in time to see Cass running toward them. Behind her was an apparently empty suit of armor, running after her like a horseless Headless Horseman.

  “Whoa—,” said Glob.