The Hypnotists

  The tearful reunion was interrupted by a hammerblow straight to Jax’s mind. He looked across the atrium to see Mako in the doorway of the ballroom, glaring at him with naked hatred and malice.

  Oh, no, you don’t. Not this time!

  Jax stared back, totally focused, putting everything he had into repelling this blitz. For a breathless moment, there were only two people in the hotel, locked in a kind of combat that was invisible to the throng around them. On one side, the most experienced hypnotist alive; on the other, the twelve-year-old heir to the legendary bloodlines of Opus and Sparks. A colossal standoff.

  Braintree stepped between them, taking the brunt of Mako’s assault with his own powerful eyes.

  Jax tried to shove him aside. “Get out of the way, man! This isn’t your fight!”

  The guild president’s gaze never wavered from Mako. “It was my fight before you were born.”

  It took the combined efforts of the New York Police Department and the United States Secret Service to bring the confrontation to a close. They surrounded Senator Douglas and escorted him out of the hotel along with his entourage — which included Mako.

  Before Sentia’s director joined his one-time candidate and friend, he turned to the Opus party and snarled, “This isn’t over.”

  Jax had a sinking feeling that this was one of the rare times Dr. Mako was telling the truth.

  Mr. Opus’s strident voice reverberated through the apartment. “What do you mean, ‘leave’?”

  “You heard Mako, Dad,” Jax reasoned. “He’s going to come after us again. He can get into our heads! Look at what almost happened today alone. You tried to jump in front of a subway train, and I thought I could fly. If it weren’t for Axel …”

  There was no need to finish that sentence. The Opuses knew perfectly well what would have happened without the president of the Sandman’s Guild. Their son would be dead, and they almost certainly would not be around to mourn him.

  “We’re very grateful to Axel,” Mrs. Opus assured her son. “If we neglected to thank him at the hotel, it was only because we were both in shock. And he was pretty angry with his sandmen at the time. Who would have thought hypnotists would turn out to be such crooks?”

  Her husband chose that moment to inspect his fingernails. This was no time to bring up the family history he’d worked so hard to forget.

  Jax stuck up for the guild members. “Those ‘crooks’ came through for us big-time when we needed them. But we can’t expect them to stand guard outside our apartment building. When Mako comes back for us, we have to be gone!”

  Mr. Opus stubbornly refused to understand. “You mean move?”

  “Not just move,” Jax argued. “We have to change our names and go someplace nobody knows us. Like a kind of witness-protection program for hypnotism.”

  “We can’t do that!” Mom sputtered in outrage. “Your father has a job; I have a practice. It’s taken years to build our careers to where we are today! You want us to toss all that in the garbage over your … hocus pocus?”

  “There’s nothing magic about diving off a fourteenth-story balcony,” Jax insisted. “Even if science can’t explain how Mako made me do it, it still happened. And I’d be dead-dead, not fantasy-dead, if I’d hit the floor. The same goes for jumping in front of trains, or off bridges, or lighting yourself on fire, or anything else you can be convinced to do when you’re bent!” He spread his arms wide. “You of all people should listen, Mom. They named this stuff after Mesmer, and he was your cousin!”

  “Distant cousin,” she said stiffly.

  “Very distant,” her husband added.

  Jax turned on his father. “And compared with your relatives, guys like Axel and Mako are amateur night. It’s not hocus pocus — it’s as real as an earthquake. And if we don’t get out of the way, we’re going to be flattened.”

  The Opuses were quiet for a long moment. Jax had not yet won them over, but he could sense that his words were beginning to sink in.

  Mr. Opus broke the silence at last. “It’s no small thing to uproot your entire life.”

  “I know, Dad. It won’t be easy. But the Sandman’s Guild has offered to help.”

  “Oh, that’s a good one!” Mom exclaimed. “I’ve seen their kind of ‘help.’ They’re probably waiting for us to leave so they can ransack our apartment!”

  Dad tried to be reasonable. “What about money? We have some savings, sure. But that’s for the future. It’s your college fund, Jax.”

  Jax was grave. “No college will accept me if I’m dead.”

  His parents just stared at him.

  Jax came back to himself with a shiver to see Axel Braintree smiling reassuringly at him. He stretched, almost knocking over the folded chiropractor’s table that was leaning against a stack of boxes in the U-Haul.

  “Well?” he asked nervously.

  In less than twenty-four hours, the Opuses had upended their lives, packed what they could, and were about to leave New York forever. All that would be for nothing if Sentia’s director had implanted any strategic suggestions inside Jax’s mind. Mako was a compulsive schemer to the point of genius, and Jax had just spent more than two months under the man’s thumb. Would the director be able to hurt him somehow, or compel him to hurt himself, even from a distance? Or perhaps Jax harbored some sort of mesmeric architecture that would serve as a tracking device. That would be just as dangerous. Very little was beyond the capability of a hypnotist like Mako.

  There was no way for Jax to inspect himself for such time bombs, so he had allowed himself to be bent and examined by the president of the Sandman’s Guild.

  “It’s quite a nifty piece of mind-tinkering,” Braintree admitted grudgingly. “You carry a suggestion to forget everything you know about Mako and Sentia.”

  “I knew it,” Jax growled. “I’ve heard stories about ex-hypnos who don’t even recognize the people they worked with every day. What’s the trigger?”

  “That’s the genius of it,” the old man told him. “There isn’t one.”

  “But I remember every hole in every ceiling tile of that place,” Jax protested. “I wish I didn’t, but I do.”

  “There’s a separate suggestion, postponing the command to forget. And the trigger for that is neither a word nor an action.”

  Jax frowned. “Then what is it?”

  “A face. She’s a real looker, too. Blonde, blue-eyed. In my day, they called a woman like that ‘a dish.’”

  Jax nodded. “Maureen Samuels, the assistant director. She’s the first person you see when you arrive, and the last when you go home.”

  The old man’s brow furrowed. “You haven’t been there in more than a week. That should have been more than enough time to wipe your mind clean.”

  Shamefaced, Jax produced his cell phone and switched it on. The lock screen showed a picture of himself standing next to the beautiful Ms. Samuels. “It was just to show the guys at school,” he confessed. “I guess I never got around to deleting it.”

  Braintree chuckled. “Even the Great Mako can’t think of everything. He should have hired Quasimodo, not Marilyn Monroe. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about it. I disabled both suggestions.”

  Jax gave him a rueful smile. “For a guy who formed a whole guild to convince sandmen not to use hypnotism, you’re pretty smooth at it.”

  The old man shrugged. “It’s a gift. That’s the whole problem. One minute you’re saving the world; the next, you’re down at the bank, bending the manager to give you a tour of the vault.”

  Mrs. Opus heaved two suitcases over the tailgate. “That’s the last of it. Your father’s gone to take the Bentley back to the dealership. He keeps tearing up, so don’t talk about it.”

  “Believe me, I won’t,” Jax promised soberly. “You think I feel good about this? I can’t even believe it’s happening.”

  She sighed but put on a brave face. “We’ll leave as soon as he gets back.”

  “That gives me a little more time,” Jax a
cknowledged. “There’s one last thing I have to take care of.”

  The corridors of I.S. 222 looked strange to Jax, mostly because he knew he would probably never lay eyes on them again. Funny — there had been days when he would have given anything to get away from this dumpy old building with its smell of sweat socks and stale pizza. Now he was nostalgic about the place, like it was home sweet home.

  Maybe it was this: He hadn’t really had time to mourn the disaster that had come over his family. Mom and Dad, ripped from their lives and careers, thanks to him. And all of them abandoning New York, the only hometown he’d ever known or ever wanted to know. Easier to say good-bye to a rusty row of lockers than to admit that the Jackson Opus he’d been for twelve years no longer existed. In a couple of days, he’d be somebody else from somewhere else, and that was unthinkable.

  It was the middle of eighth period and the halls were empty. That was a good thing. He didn’t feel like explaining over and over again what had happened since he’d fallen down the stairs and knocked himself silly. Not that anyone would have believed his story. He barely believed it himself.

  Eighth period — French. He pressed his body against the door and peered in through the small window until he’d caught Tommy’s eye. Tommy was up like a shot and out to join him.

  “I thought you were dead, Opus! I texted you, like, six hundred times!”

  Jax hauled his friend into the nearest bathroom. “We have to talk.”

  “Tell me about it! Did you hear the news about your man Trey Douglas? CNN called it the biggest political meltdown since Watergate!”

  “Bigger,” said Jax. “In Watergate, President Nixon was bent face-to-face by a staffer. I got Trey Douglas through his teleprompter.”

  “You’re not making any sense, man! What’s going on?”

  Instead of answering, Jax looked deep into his friend’s eyes.

  Tommy was insulted. “You’re trying to hypnotize me? What for?”

  “Relax …” Jax intoned. “You are becoming very calm….”

  “No, I’m not,” Tommy spat back. “I’m becoming very ticked off! What’s with you, Opus? You know you can’t hypnotize me!”

  Jax ramped up the intensity of his stare. It was true. He’d never been able to bend Tommy Cicerelli. He also understood he had to find a way to make it work this time, for his friend’s sake. It was one thing for Jax’s own family to suffer, but Tommy was an innocent bystander. Mako had already found Tommy, had mesmerized him at least once. The boy would never be safe as long as he knew about Sentia and the Trey Douglas affair.

  Jax had told him too much already.

  “Fine,” Tommy snapped. “Bring it on, Merlin. Do your worst. I’m color-blind, remember? I’ve got you beat! To me, your famous eyes are gray on gray!”

  That makes it hard, not impossible, Jax thought, sharpening his focus. I fought off Elias Mako last night! I’m an Opus and a Sparks, and I can do this!

  When the PIP image appeared between them, Jax realized instantly that it could only be coming from Tommy. He saw himself in black-and-white, and the dark green bathroom stalls were a smoky charcoal.

  Jax wasted no time. Already this intrusion into his friend’s mind stung like a terrible betrayal. If he hung around much longer, Tommy’s thoughts and feelings would begin to leach into his own, and life was tough enough already today.

  “When you wake up, you’ll feel relaxed and happy. And this is very important: You will remember nothing of Jackson Opus’s ability to perform hypnotism. You will forget everything he ever told you about the Sentia Institute and the Sandman’s Guild. You will have no recollection of …”

  He recited a laundry list of every possible detail Tommy might have picked up over Jax’s weeks at Sentia. Never in his brief career as a hypnotist had he been so thorough and so precise. If he left Tommy with one single memory that might somehow land the kid on Mako’s radar screen, disaster would surely follow. Jax had turned his own family inside out. If he allowed Tommy to suffer, he’d never forgive himself.

  When he finished, he found himself panting as if he’d just won a marathon. There remained one more thing for him to say, and it was the most painful of all.

  “Anyway, you and Jackson Opus were never that close,” he murmured, choking up just a little. “You barely know the guy, so it doesn’t really bother you that he’s not around anymore.”

  He left his friend, his school, his life. He barely noticed the bustling city around him as he retraced his path to the loaded U-Haul.

  It was time to disappear off the face of the earth.

  Can’t get enough of Gordon Korman’s high jinks?

  Don’t miss out on the action. Turn the page for a sneak peek of the Swindle series.

  TWO WEEKS EARLIER …

  When a plan came from Griffin Bing, even the tiniest detail had to be perfect. He’d agonized over every fine point and possibility. All except one: What if nobody showed up?

  “We probably shouldn’t have put in the part about no TV,” Griffin’s friend Ben Slovak said glumly.

  Griffin and Ben sat cross-legged on their sleeping bags in what had once been an elegant living room. They were surrounded by shredded drapery, remnants of ancient furnishings, and mounds of dust. All around them, the cavernous old house creaked and groaned with hollow, eerie noises. Outside, a thunderstorm raged.

  Griffin trained the beam of his flashlight on his wristwatch: 10:34 p.m. “I can’t believe it,” he seethed. “How could we get nobody? Twenty-eight people said they were coming!”

  “Maybe they’re just late,” Ben offered lamely.

  “Nine o’clock is late. Ten-thirty is a no-show. Don’t they have any self-respect? This is like saying it’s totally fine for the adults in this town to walk all over us.”

  Ben would have dearly loved to be No-Show #29. Only loyalty to his best friend had brought him here tonight. “Come on, Griffin,” he reasoned. “What difference does it make if two people or two hundred people spend the last night in a condemned building? How does that show the adults that we’re standing up for our rights? They’re never even going to know about it.”

  “We’ll know,” Griffin said stoutly, sticking out his jaw. “Sometimes you have to prove to yourself that you’re more than just a slab of meat under the shrink-wrap in your grocer’s freezer. Why do you think I came up with the fake sleepover idea? I wanted to make sure everybody had an excuse to be here. That was the whole point behind the plan.”

  The plan. Ben groaned inwardly. It was the best thing about Griffin, and also the worst. Griffin Bing was The Man With The Plan.

  “Maybe the other kids wanted to come, but they were scared,” Ben suggested.

  “Of what?” Griffin challenged. “Dust? The rain? A whole night with no TV?”

  “This house is supposed to be haunted,” Ben insisted. “You know the rumors.”

  “What rumors?” Griffin scoffed.

  “How do you think it got abandoned in the first place? Old Man Rockford was in jail for cutting up his wife with a chain saw — that’s what Darren said.”

  “When’s the last time Darren’s said anything that’s been worth the air it took to blow it out of his big fat head?” Griffin exploded. “He also says he’s distantly related to the Rockfords — with no proof whatsoever. Besides, they didn’t even have chain saws back in Old Man Rockford’s time.”

  “They had railroads, though,” Ben noted. “According to Marcus, the real murder weapon was a railway spike pounded into her skull.”

  Griffin wasn’t buying it. “He’s just pulling your chain. You know how he loves messing with people.”

  “But Pitch doesn’t, and you know what she heard? The house is haunted by the spirit of a dog that the old man brought home from Europe after World War One. Or maybe it wasn’t a dog.”

  Griffin rolled his eyes. “Then what was it? A Komodo dragon?”

  Ben shrugged. “Nobody knows. But just a few days after it got to town, pets started disappearing. A
t first it was just little kittens and puppies, but pretty soon full-grown Saint Bernards were vanishing into thin air. And there were bones buried all around the house — only Rockford wasn’t feeding his dog any bones.”

  A flash of lightning cast strange angular shadows through the boarded-up windows. Ben paused to let his story sink in. “The townspeople took the law into their own hands. They put rat poison inside a big steak and left it on the doorstep. It never occurred to them that if an evil spirit could live inside a dog, it could live inside something else, too — like a house!” He peered around at the shadowed walls, as if expecting to see something supernatural and hideous coming through.

  “Oh, come on!” Griffin refused to be shaken. “There’s no such thing as a haunted house.”

  “Well, Marcus heard the same story,” Ben said with a sniff.

  “No, he didn’t,” Griffin reminded him. “He heard the one about the railway spike.”

  “He heard both. And so did Savannah. Only in her version, it wasn’t a dog. It was a baby.”

  “Why would the townspeople poison a baby?”

  “They didn’t. It got carried off by a chicken hawk. But the baby’s ghost put a curse on the house to take back all the years it never got to live. There was this schoolteacher — the first non-Rockford ever to live here. No one saw her again after the day she moved in — or maybe they did. People talked about an old, old woman peering out an attic window. But here’s the thing: That schoolteacher was only twenty-three.”

  A gust of wind blew through the eaves, and an unearthly moaning sound echoed around them. Ben’s head retreated turtle-like into his collar, and even Griffin paled a little.

  “No offense, Ben, but shut up. You’re starting to creep me out.” Griffin panned the crumbling walls with his flashlight. “It’s almost eleven. Nobody’s coming. Gutless wonders.”

  “It’s the railway spike,” said Ben nervously. “That’s got to be a splitting headache. Literally.”