On Thursday evening, Manfred was kicking himself even harder. The women gathered in Fiji’s store ranged in age from twenty-one to sixty. A couple of the younger women had made an effort to look “witchy” in black dresses or leggings, heavy black eyeliner, and dyed black hair—Goth with pentagrams, he told himself. The older women tended to the scarves-and-skirts style of witchiness, though one lady in her early forties was cinched into a black leather bustier and a black lace skirt, with huge silver earrings swaying from her multiply pierced ears. Manfred felt like he’d come to a bad costume party, especially when the women stood to form a circle and held hands to begin their meditation. “The full moon will make tonight an especially favorable one for self-enlightenment,” Fiji told the group before she began the invocation.

Manfred had never linked his psychic ability to witchcraft, and he had no particular religious beliefs. Fiji’s directions to implore Hecate to help those present develop their powers left him just a bit bored and faintly contemptuous. He had no idea who Hecate was. Only his certainty that Fiji herself possessed real power kept him in the store and holding the right hand of the forty-something would-be hottie and the left hand of a white-haired grandmother in a sweeping skirt.

While Fiji implored and invoked, Manfred did the mental math about what he’d clear that month, and then abruptly his brain took a left turn down a dead-end road. He found himself catching a glimpse of the awful corpse of Aubrey Hamilton. As Fiji’s singsong voice went on and on, Aubrey’s skull, with its hanks of ragged hair, rotated toward him. The darkened teeth moved under their remnants of flesh and muscle. Horribly dead Aubrey said, “I truly loved him. Tell him.”

Manfred’s eyes flew open and he looked up to meet Fiji’s. She was looking at him steadily, as if she knew he’d had a true and direct communication. She smiled. And then her eyes shut and her head dropped again, and Manfred was left to compose a grocery list for his next trip to Davy to stave off any other unwanted revelations. As long as he told himself over and over again that he needed orange juice, bread, and peanut butter, plus lightbulbs, he could keep the dreadful vision at bay.