So the Theater experience prompted me to temporarily close my more modest condo in downtown Seattle and sequester myself at Tranquility. My goal was to develop some control over the dismaying teleportation I was experiencing. Shifting into other worlds with clients watching was not a sound business plan.
I made my library at Tranquility the center of operations. It was the most tarot-centered room probably in the world. It contained thousands of volumes, pamphlets, and folios about tarot and related topics. I also had collected antique arcane objects from the systems of Wicca and Kabbalah. These were stored in temperature-controlled glass cases. Knives, chalices, crystals, and other items were displayed in the cases. My collection also consisted of hundreds of different tarot decks, many were centuries old and hand painted. I was a compulsive collector of items from the mystery traditions. The collective energy of the items in my library infused me with a sense of wonder and power.
After I settled into Tranquility, unpacking and stocking groceries, I went to my library to begin the research. I spread my cards on the big oak worktable located in the center of the room. I readied myself to meet my buddies—the High Priestess, Pento, and, my real hope, Laura Bishop.
The first angle of attack was to isolate the trigger that pulled me into the Theater. I assumed it had to rest somewhere in the cards, probably with the High Priestess card or the Knight of Pentacles. Focusing, I stared into both cards, first individually, then as a pair. Nothing. I turned them at odd angles, looked at them reversed, made faces at them. I even tried intoning Hebrew prayers over them. Still nothing.
For days, I gazed at cards, in hundreds of configurations, in futile attempts to shoot myself into Pento’s Theater. At one point, I resorted to dancing around the table singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I had the uneasy feeling the High Priestess was laughing at my lamentable efforts. I spent hours scrutinizing arcane tarot books, yellowed monographs, and musty folios, praying for a clue. I studied the symbols, hoping exposure to one of them would spark something. But I had to give up that particular avenue since the tarot is an extensive, seemingly bottomless stew of symbols. It would take years to isolate the particular trigger symbol if there were one. And I wasn’t sure there was a trigger located in the cards.
As a reader, I had one odd disability. I couldn’t remember the exact card spread for any particular client. The spread dissolved from my gray matter the minute the client left my presence. My memory glitch made it impossible for me to recreate the spreads that sent me into the Theater.
I could remember the gist of the reading, the clients’ stories, but the specific cards? Never.
After a week of hair-pulling frustration, I gave up. I was sick of looking at the damn things anyway. I was grateful I hadn’t scheduled another reading for a few more weeks. The cards were smirking at me.
Chapter Four
Battering winter rain filled the house with incessant drumming, infusing the atmosphere with that distinctly Pacific Northwest gloom, a comfort for the souls of those who love living there. It had been seven days since I last looked at cards. The break was welcome, but I was beginning to feel explosive with frustrated anticipation.
The causes of my anxiety, I decided, were a lazy Susan of choices. I chalked it up to cabin fever, my daily walks curtailed by rain, no sex in weeks, and any other plausible but inaccurate excuse. I was afraid of my next trip to the High Priestess. Since I hadn’t discerned the trigger into the Theater, I couldn’t control it. If I couldn’t control it, I was frightened. The memory of hanging in that well with Pento peering down at me produced a sheen of sweat on my brow.
In my futile search for the trigger to the High Priestess’s dais, I hadn’t reproduced the one thing that was consistent with all the other times I’d been shot into the other world: another person, a client, was present. Did I need a witness? Was that other person a part of the portal?
*
“Hey, Fitch, got time for a weird-fest?”
“And you’re choosing me because?” I could hear her amusement through the dicey cellular connection between the stormy island and Seattle.
“Because you have the most out-of-the-box mind I know, and I need your take on things. Come out to Lopez and work with me for a few days.”
“Can I bring a ‘helper’ with me? You know, for relaxation, since you’ve made it so clear you’re not my type of relaxation material.”
“Any other time I’d say it’s okay, twisted sister, but this time allows no distractions and probably little relaxation. You’ll be, um, working.” The last thing I needed was one of Fitch’s slaves screaming and gasping while I was focusing on matters of the cosmos.
“Working? And my compensation would be what?”
“Besides availing yourself to my disgustingly overpriced wine cellar, you can name it, just no ‘tie me up, tie me down’ festivities with yours truly involved. Readings, money, a new slave…those kinds of things.”
“How can I say no? My mind reels at the possibilities. Okay, I’ll empty the slaves from my dungeon, pack up, and be out by…how about tomorrow evening?”
“Perfect. Oh, and bring some video equipment, would you?”
*
Fitch and I had met several years previously when she hired me for a tarot reading. My vision revealed one of her technology clients trying to massacre her with a jaw-droppingly large assault weapon. He was convinced Fitch knew his filthy secrets of which, at the time of the reading, Fitch was ignorant.
“I have no idea what this dude is hiding. He just hired me to develop a more efficient tech network between dozens of his real estate offices.” Fitch was pressing her hands on the table, her pinched mouth expressing far more anger than fear.
“How are your hacker skills?” An idea was formulating and she was swift in catching my meaning.
“I’m the best. It’s what I do. Shall I start digging?” It was the first time I’d seen the grin of a sadist in action. It convinced me that, while she was darkly gorgeous, Fitch and I would never spend time tickling each other’s fancy. She was dangerous, but she could be useful.
My intuition was that the man who would want to murder Fitch was hiding something sexual. He was financially successful and, we learned, married with children. Secrets of men like him usually consisted of some seedy sexual activity.
Fitch was at her computer less than an hour before she uncovered her prospective murderer’s predilection for pedophilia. He had it all: videos, magazine subscriptions, websites, and a pimp who would text him via his phone when there were child sex orgies in Seattle and the cost of admission to the maggot-fest. There were even videos of him molesting small children, and he had stupidly stored them on his office computer.
“Okay, Rosten, pay dirt,” she said over the phone and told me what she had found. “What should I do next? Kidnap and torture? I can do that.”
A situation like that was a little tricky. On the one hand, we wanted him to back off Fitch, but on the other hand, we didn’t want to blackmail him and cause him to come after her with that giant gun. “None of your overt remedies will work here. He’s armed and may have friends. Can you send all those files anywhere, without them being traced back to you?”
“Child’s play, Rosten. Where should they go for maximum effect?”
I had to think about that. The man’s activities were illegal, so sending the files to the police vice division had to be included. But just for good measure, we sent the files to all his office managers, his wife, and just for entertainment, his minister.
He went to jail so quickly, it barely made a stir in the media. His wife, apparently not so attached to him as he thought, took over the real estate agencies and made them even more successful. We had no idea what the minister did with the files. Some things are best left a mystery.
After our joint adventure, I convinced Fitch that her skills would help me with my work. Fitch was a born snoop. I realized she could dig up more sensitive information than Homeland Security. A wealthy former t
ech guru, Fitch worked alone in her ultra-secure office in her waterfront home on Mercer Island, an upscale bedroom community of Seattle. She would be a perfect partner.
She was also a rampant hedonist and far more into BDSM than I was willing to contemplate, but she was loyal to me and completely closed-mouth. I had no idea who else Fitch scrounged information for. But I do know I paid scads of money for her services. Already rich, she loved the information more than she wanted the money.
*
Harsh droplights illuminated my worktable in the library at Tranquility. The colors on the cards were running together in my exhausted vision. One video camera bore in on my face while another recorded each card spread. Fitch was stepping over cords and around video equipment in an effort to keep the cameras in focus and on target.
“Dev, can we stop now. Just for an hour? I’m hungry and need some exercise.”
“And what would you do if one of your slaves asked you that question? C’mon, Fitch, just a few more card spreads. We have to hit it sometime.”
“Hell, I’m still not sure what you mean when you say ‘it.’ Will you levitate? Fall into some kind of fit? Speak in tongues?” Fitch was fiddling with her video equipment while she kvetched. She had every right to complain. Even her black leather pants appeared baggy and wilted. We’d been at it for several hours. I was laying random spreads and waiting to see what happened. Fitch ran the cameras attempting to capture a clue as to what sent me to the High Priestess and the Theater.
“I’m not sure what I do when it happens. But I do know the clients who witnessed my shifting hardly knew what was happening. So my guess is you’re going to have to wait until I come back around and tell you where I went. Then we can discuss your observations and replay the videos.”
“Okay, a few more times, then I want to look at your wine cellar. You gotta keep the help happy.”
We did six more spreads. My wrists were aching, and my hands started tingling from the countless times I had shuffled the deck that day. Leaving the last spread on the table, I was the one to start complaining. Well, more like whining.
“This isn’t working, and my sinuses need flushing. I feel responsible for calling you out here, making you take a ferry, brave the rain, the roads, and all for nothing. And who knows, maybe I’m just a victim of some sort of vivid psychotic hallucinations.”
“Hey, if it were anyone else, Dev, I’d think you might be right about hallucinations. But not you. You’re wrapped as tightly as anyone I know. Except for a little hypersensitivity to physical twitches, there are no loose bits rattling around inside your particularly gorgeous head. Go get a bottle of some great cabernet, a couple glasses, and let’s kick this situation around a little more before we spread those fuckin’ cards again.”
I resented her swearing about my cards, but didn’t feel it proper to chastise her. While I was pouring the fragrant red wine, we resumed our discussion.
Fitch was twirling her wine and sticking her nose into the glass to capture the wine’s bouquet. Without looking up, she said, “This tarot thing, explain to me exactly what happens, and give me all the details.”
As I did so, Fitch listened closely, asked clarifying questions and finally backtracked to the term “Malignity.”
“So repeat again what times in history this High Priestess said were malignant times.”
“The Crusades. I knew they were bad, but just a few days ago, I did some detailed research on them. Talk about a whitewashed piece of shameful history. The Church tricked thousands of ignorant men, women, and even children into slaughtering Muslims, Jews, or even more dismaying, their own people. ‘Heretics,’ they called them. A whole section of France was wiped out, including old people and children. Jews and Muslims were not people, just vermin to be exterminated. The soldiers believed it was for Christ, and their murderous behavior would get them into heaven. In reality, the pope and his henchmen just wanted to acquire and consolidate more power.”
As I related what I knew about the Crusades, I could feel my indignation blossom. Then I got to the story of the Children’s Crusade, a particularly evil part of the history, and my hands clamped as I stared at the forgotten tarot spread still on the table. I was bubbling with the desire to smash a medieval pope in the face. Then everything around me closed in. My head constricted and I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt forced through an exploding cannon. When I opened my eyes, I was staring into two horse nostrils.
The nostrils didn’t move, didn’t snuffle. The nostrils were not breathing.
“Where’s the High Priestess?” I asked.
“She sent me instead. Have you imbibed in alcohol?” The Knight of Pentacles’s helmeted head leaned around the lifeless horse muzzle. “I would like to taste alcohol. Humans seem so charmed by it. But since I cannot taste, sometime I will ask you to describe it to me.”
“How can you tell I’ve been drinking? Do I smell? You couldn’t smell a dead fish if it were rubbed on your upper lip.”
“True, but you have red circles on your cheeks, and your eyes are not focused. I do not think you are ready for training in the Theater. The Lady did say you are not the most disciplined candidate to fight the Malignity.”
“Look, I’ve just had a few sips. You try being forced through a psychic birth canal every time we meet, and I’ll bet you’d look drunk too.”
“Oh, is it painful to make the transition? I wondered. Hmm, well, nothing to be done about it. Let us just view it as part of your training since you will have to do it many times before this is over.”
“‘Before this is over.’ ‘The Malignity.’ Oh crap.”
“I did not say ‘Oh crap.’”
“Ya know, Pento, this is going to be an interesting relationship.”
“Pento?”
“Never mind. Just tell me what we do next.”
“Certainly. That is why we are here. I am supposed to tell you the rules of engagement in this realm. We have constructed it for human purposes, but we cannot make it just like yours. We do not have perfect sensory information to do so.”
“You’ve constructed all this?” I glanced around seeing the same plowed field, the odious water well I knew intimately, the tree, and the odd washed out blue sky.
“It is a world you know well. The world you see on your cards. This is where you will witness the malign force. It is the arena we have agreed upon for this particular battle in the eternal war. It is the Theater.” He thrust out his chest and placed his fisted hands on his armor-protected waist.
“Eternal war? But you folks don’t understand. I’m no fighter. I’ve never fought anybody, only manipulated lives. Changed the course of things, if you will.”
“Which makes you perfect for the coming clash. Their champion wields the same weapons, but he is a determined adversary.”
“He?”
“You will meet him soon in your realm, but he has a woman for a shield. You may not recognize him at first, as he may not recognize you. But when you finally meet, you will both be armed with a cause.”
“You do realize that none of this makes much sense to me. How do I know I’m not suffering from some acute psychotic episode here? Maybe you’re just a figment of my chemically imbalanced brain.”
I looked into the unnaturally beaming sun and this time silently likened it to a bright flashlight, not a ball of burning gas hovering at the center of the solar system. The plowed dirt under my feet looked real, but when I bent to grab a handful, it felt more like pulverized packing material. In fact, little bits of it were sticking to my cross trainers, just like bits of Styrofoam do when they have a slight electrical charge. I didn’t like it.
Pento must have seen my distaste. “Is the soil not to your liking? We have limits on what we can use to construct battle arenas. We have constructed a tarot world that will look somewhat like your world but does not bear close inspection if you are looking for accurate duplication. But we have had to do this before, construct Theaters for battle.”
“Wh
o usually wins the battles?”
Pento took a deep sigh. “Sometimes we win, and sometimes they win.”
“Will you be explaining who ‘we’ and ‘they’ are? And what does winning look like?”
Pento opened his mouth to answer when a deafening crash made me wince and duck my head. When I looked up, Pento and the plowed field had been replaced by Fitch standing in my library bending over a toppled reading lamp.
“Damn, I hope this lamp wasn’t valuable. I just tripped over the cord.”
“Fitch, your timing sucks.”
*
Exhausted from my trip to the Theater, I told Fitch we could take a break and get something to eat. She was full of questions, but I couldn’t talk about what happened. How could I tell anyone, even an aficionado of the twisted like Fitch, that I was either having outrageous psychic experiences or needed commitment to a psych ward?
I asked Fitch to make a few copies of me “in trance” so that I’d have ample record of my corporeal body during the experience. I intended to study the recording to find the trigger, but I wanted to do it alone. I would have to wait a few days, however, because Fitch actually seemed worried about me and showed a rarely seen solicitous side of her personality. Since I wasn’t her slave, I guessed she could afford to drop her dominatrix demeanor and show some caring for a friend. She even took off the exorbitantly priced leather pants, donned some well-worn jeans, and combed the spikes out of her black hair.
She looked positively cute. For a few minutes, I considered inviting her to my bed, but after tracing the possible outcomes of such a folly, I discarded the idea.
“‘Sin is sweet in the beginning but bitter in the end,’” I said half to myself.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing, just a little Talmudic wisdom. It keeps me above water.”
“Okay, Dev, whatever it takes.”
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