The Flash - Hocus Pocus by Barry Lyga

Author:Barry Lyga [Lyga, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

16

For a moment, Barry throught Pocus might have commandeered his brain again.

He was on the pier but didn’t remember going there, or even wanting to go there.

It was the morning following Barry’s conversation with Joe, and he found himself standing before Madame Xanadu’s. But Pocus had nothing to do with it.

He stepped over the threshold into the dark interior once more. The bell rang again. The smell of incense and lilac assaulted him, then soothed him as he adjusted to it.

“Enter freely,” she beckoned, “and unafraid.”

A part of Barry screamed at him to turn and run, to get away from Madame Xanadu and her craziness, her sheer irrationality. But that part was small and weak, and he knew it. He knew from the moment he saw the OPEN sign that he would walk in and sit down. Nothing could stop him. Not even himself.

Sliding into the chair across from her, he noticed that she’d changed not at all since the last time he’d seen her.

“Welcome back,” she said in total sincerity.

“How did you know my name?” he demanded. “I never told it to you.”

She pursed her lips; her eyebrows arched in amusement. “How do you think?”

Barry knew quite a bit about so-called mind reading. He’d studied it for a case years ago involving a hypnotist. There was something called cold reading, when a “psychic” used very subtle conversational cues and verbal manipulations to get people to reveal things about themselves without realizing it. For example, one technique was called “shotgunning” because it relied on spreading a lot of information over a large area, much like a shotgun blast. So a so-called psychic might say to a group of people, “I see with my third eye that someone here has a conflict with an older woman.” Most people had an older woman in their lives. And conflict could be anything from I hate her to She ate the last of the cold cereal this morning. The “psychic” fires a blast like that, and a bunch of people think, She’s talking about me!

Even one-on-one, using vague, probing statements—“I sense you are dissatisfied”—and then carefully studying the subject’s responses helped a phony psychic fine-tune his or her patter and zero in on the mark’s specifics. There were so many ways to “read someone’s mind,” all of which involved deception, none of which involved actual magic. The more you gave away, the easier it was for the “psychic” to get you to reveal even more. A vicious cycle.

“I can think of a couple ways that don’t involve the supernatural,” he told her.

“Then surely one of them is your answer.”

Her calm and measured tone infuriated him. Yes, there were ways she could have gleaned his name. A hidden camera somewhere with facial recognition software, for example. But it wasn’t likely. She had some kind of trick up her sleeve, Barry knew.

“I don’t believe in magic,” he told her. “I’m a scientist.”

“I don’t believe in magic, either.”

He gestured to encompass the entirety of the inside of her shop—the candles and the cards, the mason jars and the eerie knickknacks.

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