Saturday morning.

T minus one day to Theo’s birthday.

The day I would become a criminal.

I didn’t really plan on stealing Baz’s crystal ball. Not really. It was more like a loan. I just wanted to borrow it long enough to get the information I needed to save my friend’s life. I fully expected to return it. But it wasn’t like I could explain that to the people at Playland and expect them to say, Why, sure, young fella! Go right ahead! Take the antique crystal ball and see if you can change the future. Good luck to you!

That wouldn’t happen, which is why I found myself on the bus and headed for Playland at the silly hour of six o’clock. I doubted that the guard Eugene would be up and patrolling that early. I mean, who breaks into an amusement park at that hour? Nobody. Nobody but me, that is. My plan was to be in, out, and back on the bus with the crystal ball before anybody realized what had happened. Heck, I might get it back before they even realized it was gone. That ancient arcade barely had any visitors even when the park was open.

But returning the crystal ball was the least of my worries. I needed to get it home, put it in front of Theo, and hope it really did have the power to give us a clue to what might happen the next day. That was all that mattered.

I was the only one on the bus when the driver let me out at the end of Playland Parkway. It was the same driver who had dropped me off before, and he gave me the same curious look.

“I know it’s closed,” I said to the guy.

The driver just shrugged and drove off. He didn’t care.

Dawn wouldn’t come until six-thirty, which meant the park was in early-morning twilight. Perfect. I could hug the buildings of the midway and blend in, unnoticed, like a stealth fighter. Without sunlight, the normally bright colors of the park were muted and gray, giving it the look of a faded black-and-white picture. It only added to the feeling of eerie emptiness. As I moved quickly along, I couldn’t help but think of the many tragic events that had happened at the park. Was this place cursed? Had it been built over an ancient burial ground? Or was it just the victim of some incredibly bad luck?

When I slid past the Hall of Mirrors, a chill went up my spine, but I stayed focused and kept moving. I was amped up enough. I didn’t need to start imagining what had been in there with me.

I had to cross the midway and the grassy strip that ran in the center of it to get to the bumper car ride. This was where Eugene had spotted me the last time, so instead of moving in a straight line, I ran from tree to tree, shielding myself as best as I could.

Speed was everything. The longer I was there, the better the chances were that I would get caught. I jumped the chest-high wall that enclosed the bumper cars to take a shortcut through the track itself. I hurried across the empty expanse to the ride’s exit on the far side, and the sidewalk that would lead to the arcade. So far so good. No whistles were blown. No alarms went off. I had made it.

But the second I stepped inside the arcade, I was hit with an overpowering sense of…what? I wasn’t scared. Or creeped out. It was more like an intense sadness. It was still pretty dark, so the games were little more than silhouettes. Being surrounded by those antique machines made me feel as though I had stepped back in time. Again. There was nothing in there that had been built in the past fifty years. The park had a lot of history, and not all of it was good.

I walked slowly along one aisle, surrounded by the past. Unlike modern arcade games that were all about LED lights and music and animation, these things were made of wood and metal. They were mechanical. Their artwork showed laughing clowns and happy kid faces and cowboys and animals that were all from another era. Whoever had made these machines was long gone. It was like walking among mechanical ghosts. I couldn’t help but feel as though a hundred pairs of eyes were on me, silently questioning why I had dared to enter their forgotten little universe.

That feeling intensified about a thousand times when I rounded the end of one aisle and caught sight of the glass box that held the Oracle Baz. Or his dummy, looking as though he was sitting inside a glass coffin. At least his eyes were focused on the crystal ball, not me.

The crystal ball. That’s what I had come for.

I hurried along the aisle of games until I stood face to face with Baz. Or face to dummy. He was the dummy. I think. Even though the life-sized mannequin was eerily like the real thing, complete with his superior sneer, once I got that close I was way more interested in the crystal ball.

It sat on a purple velvet pillow and looked no different from an ordinary globe of glass. Did this thing really have the power to predict the future? It sure seemed so, though I didn’t buy into Theo’s atomic-power theory. As hard as it was to stop logic from taking over and thinking there was no way a hunk of glass could possess that kind of magic, I had to hope it did. Theo’s life depended on it.

I reached up and ran my fingers along the edge of the wooden cabinet, searching for a hinge or a latch or anything that would show me how to open it. This was a machine. Machines needed service. There had to be a way to get in. The good news: I felt hinges along the left edge. The bad news: instead of a latch on the opposite side, there was a series of screws. My heart sank. This was going to take some time. At least I had come prepared. I reached into my hoodie and pulled out a Phillips screwdriver that I had grabbed from my father’s workshop. Sometimes I can be smart like that. I got right to work, figuring that I not only had to unscrew a bunch of screws but also would have to screw them back in after grabbing the crystal ball. With any luck, nobody would notice that the ball was gone, and I’d return it as soon as I could.

I didn’t stop to think or question that I was doing something idiotic. And totally illegal. I just got to work.

As soon as I started to unscrew the first screw, I heard a strange noise. It sounded like a gentle thump. It wasn’t scary or anything. It was just out of place. I stopped working and listened. A few seconds passed and I was about to get back to work when I heard several more thumps. It sounded like something was rolling around and banging into things. My curiosity got the better of me, and I followed the sound.

The mystery didn’t last long. It was a pinball machine. The metal pinball was moving inside the game, but since the power wasn’t turned on, the only sound it made was from the ball bouncing against the bumpers. A few seconds later the ball reached the bottom and disappeared into the hole that sent it to the chute that would line it up for the next shot.

There was nothing weird about it except that it had happened. It wasn’t like somebody was playing the game. How had the ball been released? I figured it had probably been stuck there for a while and finally fell free. Maybe I had jostled it when I ran by. Whatever the reason, it was done, so I turned back toward Baz’s machine.

And another ball released.

I spun around quickly to see the exact same thing happen. The metal ball rolled through the game, bouncing off bumpers. There was no reason for that to have happened. At least none that made sense. But I couldn’t stress over it. Time was ticking.

I ran back to Baz’s machine and worked quickly to unscrew the next screw.

That’s when I heard another thump.

This one was much louder than the others, and it had enough power behind it to make the wall shake. This was no small pinball. There was something on the other side of the wall. Something big.

Thump!

It happened again. Somebody or something was on the other side, banging against the wall. I tried to ignore it but couldn’t. I had to know what it was. So I ran out of the arcade the way I had come and headed around the corner toward the bumper car track.

On the far side of the track, a bumper car was moving. There was no power on, but the little red car didn’t know that. Nobody was behind the wheel either. At least I’d solved the mystery of what was doing the bumping. The red car moved forward, thumped against the barricade that ringed the track, and was sent backward. It then hit the car behind it, which sent it moving forward, where it hit the barricade again.

I stood on the track, watching this dance go on and on. I must have gone into brain lock, because I couldn’t come up with any explanation for why this was happening. I was so mesmerized that I let the screwdriver drop out of my hand. It fell onto the track and made a loud clatter that echoed through the cavernous structure.

The bumper car stopped instantly. It was as if the sound had broken whatever cycle it was stuck in. I didn’t move for fear it would start up again.

And it did. The car inched forward toward the barricade. But this time it didn’t hit. It turned. The little red car with nobody at the wheel moved away from the spot it had been sandwiched in and continued to slide across the track…toward me!

I was like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. I stood with my back to the barrier that surrounded the track, unable to get my feet moving. The car picked up speed, cruising directly at me. It was like it knew I was there. My mind raced, trying to understand what was going on, but nothing came to me.

The car kept sliding closer with no sign of slowing down. It was seconds away from hitting me and pinning me against the track barrier. Once I realized what a bad spot I was in, I got moving. I snatched up the screwdriver, then quickly boosted myself up and over the barrier. A second later the red car drove into the wall right where I’d been standing. It hit with a solid thump and stopped right there.

I kept my eyes on it from the safety of the other side of the barrier, waiting for it to make its next move. I must have waited a full minute, but the car didn’t budge. There was no explanation for what had happened, and I didn’t really care. All I wanted was to be somewhere else. But I couldn’t leave without the crystal ball. So as much as I was ready to run for the park’s exit, instead I sprinted back along the path to the arcade to crack the machine open, grab the ball, and get the heck out of there.

I went right to work on the screws, desperate to get them out before anything else weird happened. My hands were shaking with nervous energy, and the screwdriver kept slipping out of the screw heads. By trying to go fast, I was taking far longer to get the job done than if I had just slowed down and stayed calm. But calm wasn’t happening just then. I had gotten two screws out and had two more to go when I heard some kind of mechanical whirring.

The sound was coming from behind me. I didn’t want to turn around. I didn’t want to see what it was. I didn’t want to be there anymore. But I had to look. I turned around slowly to see that one of the games across the aisle from the Baz machine had come to life. It was a big glass cube that held a two-foot-tall marionette.

A clown marionette.

I hate clowns. Whoever was the first person to think it was a good idea to put on hideous makeup that makes your features bigger than life while wearing rainbow clothes was just plain demented. The clown doll hung from wires attached to its arms and legs, standing upright in all its clowny freakishness. The doll was lit from below by the glow of a row of bulbs that had sprung to life. Why was there suddenly power? The wheezy sound of circus calliope music began to play. I wasn’t even worried about anybody hearing and coming to find out what was going on. I was too focused on the creepy little clown. I actually left the Baz machine and walked toward the marionette. It was like I was being drawn there. I don’t know if I was moving closer to try and figure out how the machine could have turned itself on, or because that sinister little puppet was somehow hypnotizing me. Whatever the reason, I moved closer.

When I was only a step away, the clown’s arm twitched.

And I jumped.

The idea of the machine was to put in your nickel and move the handles in front. That would make the clown’s arms wave or his knees bend. You could make the thing dance, which might have been fun for a three-year-old…a hundred years ago.

It wasn’t much fun for me, that was for sure, especially because I wasn’t touching the controls. The clown hopped on one leg, which made its arms bounce. It jumped back and forth from one leg to the other in a macabre doll dance in time to the haunting calliope music.

I was losing my mind. Nobody was controlling this thing. The knobs in front weren’t moving. I tried to tell myself that it was preprogrammed to do the lame dance, but that didn’t explain why it had turned itself on. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. All thoughts of the crystal ball and Theo and the fact that I was trespassing had flown out of my head.

And then the clown stopped dancing. So did the music. I was left in eerie silence. I kept staring at the little freak, hoping the performance was over.

It wasn’t. The doll’s arms were at its sides. Slowly, one rose until it was parallel with the floor. Its little clown finger was pointing at something. There was no mistake. Its head was tilted to the side with a blank expression. Its dead eyes looked nowhere. But its finger was pointing as if telling me to look.

I didn’t want to, but I had to. I turned slowly to see it was pointing at Baz’s fortune-telling machine. I had no idea why…

…until Baz’s machine came to life.

The lightbulbs inside his little cubicle warmed up, bathing the box in an eerie yellow glow. The lights created deep shadows under Baz’s eyes, making the dumb dummy look more like a menacing dummy. Seeing the lights come on was a surprise. It wasn’t the worst surprise.

Baz’s arm moved.

The machine was gearing up to tell a fortune.

Nobody else was around. There was only one person there whose fortune it could tell.

Mine.

I didn’t think for a second it was going to tell me I was about to win a million dollars. Every cell in my brain was screaming at me to get out of there. But I couldn’t. I had to know.

Slowly, I walked back to the machine. Baz’s lifeless eyes stared deep into the crystal ball as a blue light glowed from within it. Strange flute music drifted from the machine—the same kind of music that had played during Baz’s live performance eighty years earlier. It was a pretty dramatic presentation, for an ancient machine.

One I didn’t really care to see.

I walked right up to the machine. Baz’s head behind the glass loomed above me. His arm made a mechanical sweeping motion over the crystal ball, and the blue light went out. His hand continued on to a box of cards that sat next to the crystal. The hand reached down and plucked out a card; the same kind of card that Theo and Jenny had gotten. The mechanical fingers clenched the card as the hand lifted and swiveled toward an opening in the table. The fingers opened and released the card. It dropped through the hole and appeared in a small trough in the front of the machine’s cabinet, ready for the taking.

The lights went out and the music ended. Baz went back to staring into the dark crystal ball. The show was over.

But my fortune was sitting in front of me.

Reaching for it was like moving my hand through pudding. I knew I had to read it, but part of me was holding back, convinced I shouldn’t. It was a battle being fought inside my brain. I truly feared what the card would say. I finally plucked it from the trough and looked at it. On one side was the familiar logo: The Oracle Baz. My fortune would be on the other side. My hand was shaking. Literally shaking. It took an incredible amount of willpower, but I finally turned the card over.

A single word was written on the card, printed in bold capital letters:

RUN!

Run? What did that mean? That wasn’t a fortune. I kept staring at the card, trying to understand.

I looked up at the dummy of the Oracle Baz and nearly screamed.

Baz was looking straight at me. His eyes were focused with an intent gleam that made my heart stop.

That’s when he spoke.

“Run!” the dummy said.

I got the message. I was outta there. I turned, ready to take off and sprint as far away from this cursed amusement park as I could get. But when I turned, I saw that I wasn’t alone.

At the far end of the aisle of ancient games stood a shadow. Or what seemed to be a shadow. It was the shape of a man who stood there, blocking my way. Its outline was sharp and defined, as if it had been cut out of reality to leave a dark void. There was no detail inside, only eternal black.

The visitor from the Hall of Mirrors was back.

I put on the brakes and stood facing the apparition, too stunned to move.

The shadow lifted its arm, pulling the shadow of a curved sword from a sheath. There was no detail to the sword, but its outline was unmistakable.

The shadow lifted the sword over its head threateningly, ready to bring it down hard.

On me.

Another fortune was about to come true. My fortune.

I ran.