Her name was Manuela the Magnificent and Marvelous, the Keeper of the All Seeing Eye, and Bulwark of Carnies. Or so the tattered canvas sign draped over her tent claimed. For a quarter, one could buy a stub of admittance to consult with her. And for those poor souls on a tight budget, such a meeting was preferable to costly professional therapy.
I, Charlie Jacobson, was such a soul. I can’t really say what motivated me to see her, except that I was going crazy over a girl. It was autumn, school had started, and my affection was stressing me out. When I hit up the Gypsy Days Extravaganza carnival that ran through town, the deep-fried funnel cakes and corn dogs hadn’t provided enough consolation. My scruples spent in starch, I was perhaps desperate—desperate enough for witchcraft.
The line to Manuela consisted of two persons: myself, and a hunched over elderly fellow ahead me who hobbled with a walker. We had both paid a dwarf dressed in a gaudy purple tabard with green fringe for our tickets. He didn’t do much to try and sell us the attraction, save grunt, “You want in ‘dis gig, huh?” He snapped off blue cardboard and vanished between the flaps of the marquee.
Waiting with my companion, I tapped my foot along to some accordion and guitar melodies that crept around the grounds, trying to phase out all the cries of panicked delight from the rides nearby. The old man wasn’t much for conversation either. He nodded at me in acknowledgement and quaintly muttered “27, 4, 14, 69, 43, 7!” to himself as he rustled a fortune cookie slip in his hands. Whatever, I was cool with being awkward.
By and by, the dwarf remerged and beckoned with stubby fingers for the first customer. I continued waiting alone and fished for some cotton candy in my backpack. A faint strawberry flavor, it was too wispy for my liking. I broke it up and tried to feed the sugary remains to a crow perched on a tent peg. A peck or two and the bird came to same conclusion that it wasn’t good eating, and with a cry of disgust flew off into the tent.
Being friendly had run its course it seemed. I began to whistle, hands in pockets, exercising patience. I had managed a few bars of “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” when something comparable to a dying engine failing to turn over interrupted. It issued from the tent. The whining gradually introduced itself as a persistent growling. Okie dokie then.
“I guess the gypsy magic needs a tune-up today,” I chuckled.
No canned applause met my one-liner; rather, a roaring explosion. Smoke charged through the cracks of the structure and blackened me with a film of suit.
“Everything going all right in there?” I called out.
“SWEET LAWD! OH, SWEET LAWD?” Apparently, the old man was being vocal now.
“No,” I said. “It’s just me, Charlie. What’s going on?”
The engine works again, building up to a loud nuisance. Then a hand popped under the entrance, shaking and stippled with blood.
“SWEET LAWD!” I exclaimed, and rushed to the hand. I grasped it with my own and pulled.
Someone had a hold on him as well, naturally. So the tug-of-war match began.
“What,” I gasped between breaths, “is the problem here?”
“LAWDY LAWD,” said the muffled voice, “MY EYES HAVE SEEN THE COMING OF THE GLORY OF THE—”
“Oh, shut-up,” I said, tugging all the more. I dug my heels into the soil and gave one big heave. I fell backwards with the old man on top of me. I didn’t get to touch the ground before his weight was lifted and he scurried away. Turning on my side, I saw that he was lacking his jeans and walker, hightailing it well enough, pale bum proudly jiggling. Huh.
I snapped out of it and got on my feet. I thought about running off myself, but I figured I should probably get my money’s worth. I stood in front of Manuela’s tent, pretending to be nonchalant about the whole senior citizen flashing incident in order to be serviced. After all, it was silent with Grandpa Mooner off the premises.
Two minutes later the dwarf came out smiling, likewise covered in suit, wiping his face with a rag. “Hey, kid,” he said, handing me the rag, “you’re up.”
“What was that?” I asked while giving my face a quick clean.
The smile widened to reveal a gap of blackened stumps. “Technical difficulties, kid.” He took back the rag and hit the entrance with it. “After you!”
I entered the madness. The surroundings were plain, albeit a tad charred, with only a mangled, half-melted walker to call into question upon entry. A small table was centered in the tent with what I presumed to be a cliché crystal ball sitting on it, covered with a cloth embroidered with eyeballs. Nice touch.
“Where’s Manuela, man?” I wondered aloud, but found that the dwarf had not followed me. Great.
There was a ruffling of feathers and some cawing. The crow I’d tried to stuff with cotton candy rested on a chair at the table. He tapped it with his beak twice, then gazed at me.
“What?”
The crow repeated the ritual. I got the message: Have a seat.
Once comfortable in the chair, the crow rested on my shoulder. I attempted to shoo him but his claws dug into my shoulder and he sang a nasty note. As if on cue, my vision blurred for a second; clarity restored shortly, I noticed that someone sat across the table from me. My heart did a loop in my chest, because in front of me was none other than the girl that I’d come to seek advice about, the girl of my dreams, Sally Walker.
She was dressed in green cheerleading uniform, no turban or flowing robes. Her blond hair rested nicely in pleasant curls on her shoulders. She also decided to do some gazing at me in silence. Words today were hard to come by.
Finally, she spoke in voice that wasn’t Sally’s—a slow, grating sound that didn’t become her feminine countenance: “Tee-eee-chut?”
I couldn’t make sense of it. “Huh?”
“Tee-eee-chut?” She repeated, raising a brow, open palm extended.
My shoulder smarted as the crow sprang off and fluttered around my person. He sat on her shoulder now with my blue ticket in his mouth. Oh. “Tee-eee-chut” meant ticket. If this game of language charades with bird translators continued, I was in for a headache.
Sally laughed and retrieved my paperwork from the crow. “Thank you, Miguel,” she chimed, her agonizing drawl obviously over. “I believe you can keep watch for more customers now.”
With that, the crow flew out of the tent. Sally produced a metal punch and promptly put a hole in my ticket. “Thank goodness,” she sighed. “The last customer’s ticket got revoked. Only the pure in heart can see me.”
“What happened to him?”
“Oh, he thought I was some sort of witch doctor,” she explained. “He came in hoping for me to confirm his lotto numbers as being lucky. But I read into his scheme. While his numbers were a winning combination, he wanted to know what great things he would do with the prize money in his heart. The thing is, he already knew.”
“He did?”
“Yes.”
I ventured further. “And what was that?”
Her nose scrunched into a snarl. “He wanted. Not love such as you seek, but wanted. In fact, he wanted so many things that he was found wanting. Mostly, he was lustful, and therefore I appeared unto him as the harlot he always desired—scantily clad, oiled up, and empty.”
“Is that why,” I said, rolling my eyes, “he didn’t have any pants on when he left?”
She then rested her head in her hands, and said dreamily, “Quite right, Charlie. You see, having come in contact with a female apparition of his heart, he tried to consummate a bond with himself in the biblical sense. He could not know himself on his own merits. Therefore, when he advanced after handing me his ticket and taking off his trousers, he expected to meet ultimate pleasure.”
“Ooo,” I joked. “And did he meet pleasure?”
She winked at me. “Not pleasure, but fire!”
“Fire?”
“Yes, before he touched me, I tried punching his ticket, and there was a malfunction. The punch is quite intuitive and threw a fit. Thus all the nastiness you heard outside. It refused to admit him. Taking that as a sign of an unworthy heart, I expelled him from my house.”
“And you expelling him was the—”
“Fire,” Sally finished. “For Manuela the Magnificent always deals with her customers according to what they are. And my Fire is the last word in all matters.”
“So you’re not Sally at all, are you, Manuela?”
Manuela giggled, and Sally’s face shimmered brightly, no longer recognizable amidst the pulsing flames that took up her form. “Very good! Now let us see you for what you really are.” What I assumed to be a hand licked off the cloth draped over the crystal ball.
Yet there wasn’t a ball to be found. Instead, a sulfurous sphere floated from the midst of the table, shooting beams of whiteness all over. I let out a whimper, for though my eyes were open, the reach of my sight perceived only the sun that rendered all things blank.
“Hmm,” Manuela began. “Most interesting you are. And handling the Eye better than many who’ve sought me.”
Coals were raked across my body in a most horrible heat as Eye focused on me. “Ah,” Manuela said softly, “I know now why you’ve come.”
“Why don’t you tell me, dammit,” I managed to say though gritted teeth.
“My Eye perceives all things, Charlie. And I see that you really don’t care for Sally Walker as you thought you did. She’s just a simple girl with simple goals. She’ll continue to date the quarterback until the senior prom next year. You are far from her mind, though she is very near yours. By then, you’ll be far too distracted to pursue a courtship with the likes of her”—Manuela clicked her tongue—“because you’ll be like me, a Keeper of the Eye.”
“And what the hell is the Eye!” I screamed.
My skin was blistering. “My dear Charlie,” Manuela chided. “Haven’t you guessed? The Eye is Truth. You came into my tent and you saw me as Sally, the desire of your heart, and yet I am not Sally, though I know her. The gambling pervert saw the implications of his heart in destruction. The Eye is the Mirror of all mirrors, the Reflection of all reflections, the Glass that burns through the anthills of illusion.”
“Are you God?”
The pain relented but a moment. “The Eye is that which is uncreated, yet creates. I wield it, so that you may bear it also.”
“What kind of answer is that?”
“The only answer that you require,” Manuela said sternly. “You have awakened me and I have opened the Lid from its slumber. You are now left with a choice, Charlie: take on the Eye, or continue in darkness. Which is it?”
The heat reached a searing peak. Everything came into focus in a primitive reasoning. I could continue to endure the heat or I could become part of it. “I choose sight,” I said. “I choose sight!”
The ball collided with my forehead and burrowed there, boiling my skin to nothingness. Agony aside, swirls of color wrapped into my vision once more. And I saw a fat, dark-skinned pumpkin of a lady in a patched dress instead of the inferno across the table.
“Is that how you really look, Manuela?”
She stroked a thin mustache. “Eh, most of the time. You like it?”
“Eh—”
“Good. Now, off with you. You have the Eye, I’m afraid.” She got a hand mirror. “Mira, dear.”
Forming an odd triangle, I now had three eyes. “Great!”
Manuela got up. “Don’t worry, no can see it. Save a few others like me. And they are rare in the finding. I think you’ll see once you’ve exited my abode that nothing will ever look the same to you.”
“But—”
“No buts, Charlie, the Eye is your burden now. Off with you! Be a good boy, Miguel will give you a hat on the way out. We will talk another time than now, I’m sure, so hasta lluego, huh?”
A blur and blink and Manuela was gone. The dwarf was in the tent, however. “Hey, kid,” he said in greeting. “I gotcha a hat to cover up that Eye.”
It was part of a tanned bearskin, the head and a bit of fur to tie a knot with. Cosmetics aren’t a concern for a Keeper of the Eye, I’ve learned. The dwarf must have noticed my disapproval because he said, “Don’t give Miguel that look, kid. You asked for it in whistling outside there. And trying to give me cotton candy like I’m your pet? Please.”
“You’re a bird? Geez, I ought to—”
“Uh-huh,” Miguel said examining a broken nail, looking bored. “Get out of here kid, you got work to do.”
I left the tent and found myself not in a carnival as I’d started out. There was a dark path of gravel with gnarled dead trees surrounding it, some fallen to obscure the road. Manuela had been right that things weren’t going to appear as they’d seemed.
Miguel the crow landed on my shoulder. “Come on,” he urged. “Let’s go.”
“You’re coming?” I said, surprised.
“For a bit, I’ll lead you to the Office. You’ll get an adjustment there for the Eye.”
“There are other Keepers?”
“Oh yes,” Miguel snorted. “One Eye, but many Keepers. Some that have been Awake with the Eye for centuries.” He jumped off with a beat of his wings into the heights. “Come on, we haven’t all day, follow me, kid.”
I surveyed the path. It wasn’t as dark as I’d thought. There was a light coming from my head that pierced through the murk—the illuminating Eye. I’ve been unsure, and confused, but this much I remember, the Eye showed me the way. I ran after the crow in this knowledge, like a bear hunting down its prey. And the gravel gave way to my feet which carried me on to my greatest adventure yet.
The Rowdy Hobbit 