Hired a fortune teller for my step-daughter's birthday party. She ruined my life.

Birthday balloons and objects that suggested a family friendly version of the occult surrounded her. The collapsible table that my wife used for laundry folding was now covered in a dark red tablecloth and a crystal ball the size of my skull sat at the centre of it.

‘Shame the kids had to leave,’ she said in a tone far too casual for a fortuneteller.

‘Yeah,’ I said, taking out my wallet. It had been a long day at work. My step-kid’s birthday party had turned into an impromptu trip to the zoo and there was a bottle of cognac waiting for me in the study. I didn’t want to spend a second longer talking to the fortuneteller than I had to.

‘Real shame,’ she said, electing to shuffle her glossy tarot cards instead of packing up, ‘We didn’t even get to use the crystal ball. The kiddos always get a kick out of that. Ah well — your daughter seemed pretty interested though. If she would ever like a private session I’d be more than happy to —‘

‘You don’t actually believe this stuff, do you?’

Aside from the sequence covered blouse and the plastic pendants hanging around her neck the fortuneteller looked like someone you would find strolling down the produce aisle. My question, however, seemed to have ripped her from the world of the mundane into something far more mystical. Her face twisted into a confused grimace, the gray mole beneath her eye twitched. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, in a tone feigning offense.

‘This. All of this shit — magic. You don’t actually believe in magic, do you?’ I asked, pointing to the silliest object on the table.

She picked up the flimsy plastic stick labeled as the Magical height predictor and laughed. ‘This specifically? No. I don’t think a piece of plastic can predict someone’s height. That’s just something I keep around for the kiddos.’ She dropped the stick on the table as if it was something that belonged in the recycling bin, but when her stubby fingers hovered above the crystal ball her voice lost all track of humor. ‘This, however, the idea that there is more to the world than what meets the eye — that I believe in. Unapologetically so.’ She grinned. I didn’t.

My step-kid recently got obsessed with some show about middle-school witches so hiring a fortuneteller for her party seemed like a reasonable call. The birthday party would be contained to the basement, she’d get to pretend magic is real and I would have peace and quiet in my study. My stepdaughter, however, also recently became obsessed with some Timmy or Tommy kid from her class. She invited him to the party. His mother dropped him off. Tommy’s mother found fortunetelling to be an affront to our lord and savior Jesus Christ. She was very vocal about it. She wasn’t going to let her child be “indoctornated” with the “work of Satan”.

My daughter refused to continue her birthday party without Timmy; all interest in crystal balls and tarot cards went down in a shrill torrent of fire and brimstone. In an effort to save the day my wife loaded all the kids into the minivan and drove over to a nearby zoo. Tommy’s mother didn’t have a problem with animals in cages.

‘Do you believe in anything?’ she asked, going back to mixing the tarot cards.

‘What?’

‘I presume you’re not of the same thought as the angry lady that was yelling about Satan a couple minutes ago, but I’m curious. Do you believe in a higher power? Karma perhaps?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘Look, can I just pay you? I have business to attend to.’

‘Sure.’ She smiled politely, but she didn’t stop shuffling. When I produced two fifty-dollar bills she cocked her head to the side. ‘That’s not the amount I agreed on with your wife. That’s half.’

‘We booked you for an hour. You stayed for twenty minutes. Half seems reasonable to me.’

‘It might seem reasonable if you discount travel time, availability, marketing and the gift bags I brought for your child’s birthday party.’ She didn’t budge from her seat, instead she cleared a layer of invisible dust from her crystal ball.

The cognac bottle was calling to me from my study. ‘Hundred bucks. Take it or leave it,’ I said. For a moment she simply watched me, quietly making calculations of character. Then her lips parted.

‘How about we have ourselves a little bet?’ she said, her voice softening. ‘I’ll show you something, some magic — as you called it. If I convince you that there’s something out there bigger than us then I’ll take your money and go.’

‘No. Just take the money.’

The fortuneteller didn’t even look at the bills. She just politely smiled and went back to her tarot cards. ‘Well, if you’re not going to pay me the agreed sum it looks like I’ll just have to wait for your wife to come back home,’ she said with no frustration showing. After that I became invisible to her. All of the fortuneteller’s attention was focused on the cards she was playing with.

For a moment I considered calling the cops, but I concluded that would be far too much of a hassle. I would wait. My wife has always been better at dealing with these situations anyway. The bottle from the study was calling my name but there was no way I was going to leave someone who was interested in the occult alone in my basement. Trying to make the best of an irritating situation I topped off my glass in the study and went back to keep an eye on the woman with the crystal ball.

The fortuneteller didn’t even look up when I came down the stairs. Her world seemed to be completely contained to the cards she was shifting around the table. I would have rather sat in the sofa I have in the study but the amber liquid in my glass made the stairs comfortable enough. With each sip of my drink the stress from the workday drifted out of my chest, even the presence of the fortuneteller and her tacky décor ceased to bother me. I was starting to properly enjoy my drink but then she spoke again:

‘Is your faith ever shaken?’ the fortuneteller asked, clearing her tarots into a single deck, ‘There has to be at least a tiny part of you that has doubt. How naïve is it to think that we understand all of this?’ She spread out her arms as if my cramped basement was the most complex mystery in the universe.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Our wager,’ she said, smiling, ‘You look like a man who would prefer to drink without my company and I would like to be elsewhere as well. All it will take is a couple minutes of your time— or, if you want me out of your house even faster, just give me my two hundred dollars.’

The smell of laundry detergent was sneaking hints of dish soap into my drink. I knew the glass was clean. I knew the cognac was good — yet the aftertaste was still there. ‘What happens if you do convince me that magic is real?’

‘So you do have doubts.’

‘No, I just want to know what I’m signing up for.’

‘If I convince you there’s something more to this world than meets the eye then I will take the one hundred dollars and leave.’ She pushed one of the children’s chairs out from behind a table and beckoned me to sit down.

‘So what do you get from convincing me?’

‘A feeling of self-satisfaction.’ As she grinned the gray mole beneath her eye became almost imperceptible. ‘That’s why we do most of the things we do, right?’

I didn’t want to argue another abstract point with her. I just wanted to enjoy my drink in peace. As I sat down at the table all of the fortuneteller’s tchotchkes were cleared away leaving nothing but the oversized crystal ball. She reached across the table and took my hands in her stubby fingers.

‘Now, could I ask you to breathe on the crystal ball?’

The object in front of me looked less like a window to the realm of the supernatural and more like a shell of someone’s ornate porch light, but the moment I exhaled the ball filled with fog. The single breath of waxy liquor had summoned a restless cloud of dark smoke. The fortuneteller squeezed my hands tight. Beyond the screen of darkness, something twitched.

‘You’ve felt it before,’ she said, her voice growing dark, ‘That feeling of being watched — of being observed. You might have shrugged it off as an intrusive thought or as a twitch of your imagination but it was instinct. You’ve felt it before. You knew the explanation wasn’t as simple as you wanted to believe.’ Her stout fingers dug into my palm.

‘You should have given me the money.’

The colorful birthday balloons behind the fortuneteller had become mere blurs. Her eyes had grown pale, the dark mole on her cheek spread like a cigarette burn carving through upholstery. ‘Look inside of the crystal ball and see what you’ve convinced yourself doesn’t exist.’

A pair of bulging milky eyeballs stared at me from the dark clouds. They shivered in anticipation, as if they were ready to burst and splatter all across the crystal barrier that divided us. They watched me. They watched me just like they had before. The memory of the eyes rushed into my mind violently and with no remorse.

It was dark. I was an infant. The walls of my crib were impossibly tall and they hovered over me. Shapeless creatures of darkness stood over me with eyes of cruel moons. I could scarcely comprehend the world around me but I knew those white-eyed beings meant me harm.

I screamed — My pitiful cries did nothing to fend off the incomprehensible shadows that hovered over me. I screamed until the lights turned on and my mother appeared. She held me to her chest, trying to calm me, telling me that there was nothing to be scared of.

‘You were lied to. You were tricked. Your understanding of the world has been crippled by confidence and fetishism of the measurable.’ Her fingers traveled down my wrist like a spider covered in ice. Beyond the crystal ball I could see her leaning towards me, her face shifting in the sudden dimness — yet I couldn’t look away from those two globes of dripping white.

I must’ve been around six. Me and my older cousin went exploring the woods near our grandfather’s cabin. We found an ancient drainage pipe that lead to a world of darkness. My cousin wanted to explore it, he insisted — but I refused. I couldn’t — I couldn’t go in there. They were watching me.

‘Kids teach themselves to forget. They ignore the unexplainable. They force themselves into blindness to make the world more palatable. But their eyes are still there. They just need to be reminded. All it takes is a hint and they can see the truth once more.’ Frozen daggers which drew no blood were crawling up my forearms. I pried my eyes away from the crystal ball and looked up at the fortuneteller.

My cry of terror came out as a pathetic gurgle tasting of cognac and spit.

She had become completely shapeless. Her fingers writhed like trails of dust in a tornado. Her body seemed to exist purely as a trick of the fluorescent lights that hung above us. All was shapeless, but her eyes.

They pulsed above me — two massive chunks of malicious flesh.

Last week my stepdaughter woke us up crying, saying that there was a monster hiding in her closet. My wife and I went to her bedroom to comfort her, to tell her that there are no such things as monsters but when the little girl insisted that I check around her coats to make sure there are no creatures waiting to harm her — I refused. At the time I didn’t know why I wanted to stay away from the darkness of the closet, but looking up at those vein covered balls of light— I understood.

Deep within me I knew what was hiding inside of that closet. I just refused to accept it.

With the fortuneteller hovering over me there was no denying it.

‘How goes our wager?’ the words slithered out of her nonexistent lips like a thousand whispers, ‘Is your faith still unshaken?’

I tried to speak but all that left my mouth was spit. My body was completely frozen in the unforgiving gale of an incomprehensible reality. All I managed to do was nod my sweaty face.

She smiled a crooked grin that only existed as a trick of the light. ‘Good,’ a thousand hushed voices said, ‘I hoped you learned your lesson.’

Beads of ice-cold sweat dropped from my chin as I nodded again.

‘I’ll make sure you don’t forget it.’ With each word that slithered out of the shadows the eyeballs inflated further until the flesh could no longer hold. Like a balloon bursting in slow motion, tendrils of an impossible black liquid grew from ripples into waves.

The darkness consumed me fully.

I said nothing to my wife. It is not until now that I am able, barely, to capture the raw terror of my encounter in words. Even if I could talk to her about this madness, if I could somehow convince her that what I have witnessed was real — I doubt it would be of any help. I don’t need emotional support. I need psychiatric evaluation — or an exorcist.

After the darkness passed all trace of the fortuneteller was gone. All I was left with was the remnants of an eight-year-old’s birthday party and the intrusive scent of laundry detergent. The basement in which I collapsed had been completely empty, but deep in the back of my skull there was a certainty — I knew I was being watched.

As I write these words I sit in my well-lit study. There is an empty bottle of cognac next to me but it has done little to calm my mind. Outside, night has fallen. My blinds are closed but the darkness outside is undeniable. Through the cracks I see movement, out there, beyond the dim lights of suburbia — something is watching me.

I fear my punishment will not be swift.