Then I found a bottle of antacid medication, drank half of it, and wrote myself a reminder to call my acupuncturist in the morning. I was certain the stress was compromising my immune system.
*
My sleeping herbs didn’t help me that night. All the questions and information I was grappling with kept me tossing my bedcovers off and on. First, I would remember Senator Stratton’s smooth, hypnotic voice asking me not to harm Laura Bishop, then I’d flip my blanket off. Then the High Priestess’s voice would dismiss me as being somehow not enough. Not enough for what? I’d pull the blanket on. And then Pento mentioned “He-Who-Comes-Before” as if not knowing about this person were dangerous somehow. I flipped the blanket off. All these voices were mingled with Laura Bishop’s scream as she fell from the tower. I pulled the blanket on. Finally, around three a.m., I huffed out of bed and went to my study. I needed to talk to somebody.
This time, instead of trying tarot card combinations, I simply sat in my office chair, rested my head on the chair back, and thought about all the questions that were plaguing my brain. I silently called to the High Priestess, asking her for an audience. Nothing happened.
My mind drifted to Elizabeth Stratton and her bizarre appearance at my isolated house in the San Juan Islands, and that made me pissed off. Who told her about me and my work? How did she find Tranquility? How dared she let her goons harass my friend; they even damaged Fitch’s car. Stratton was a senator of the United States, a probable presidential candidate, and she was behaving like an underworld boss. My indignation caused me to grip the arms of the chair, so I attempted to relax my hands. My palms flattened and pushed onto something cold and hard. I opened my eyes and found myself on hands and knees, looking at a foot that was rocking a crescent moon. I was in front of the High Priestess, pressing my hands into the marble dais.
I took a deep breath, and as I looked to her face, another realization came to me about this strange world I kept visiting: it had no smells. It was a vacuum, an absence of olfactory stimulation that left me unhinged, unable to use all my faculties in response to her or any of the other situations. Until that moment, I had never considered that the sense of smell was so crucial to human functioning.
“We only recreate the senses necessary for your ability to understand our designs for your services.” Her eyes watched me from her immobile face.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I forced myself to stand and fought dizziness, feeling the weight of fatigue and anxiety.
“We believe the sense of smell is not necessary here, so we don’t create olfactory experiences. Besides, we aren’t adept at it. We’ve tried in the past, and our champions often became sick or overwhelmed. It’s not necessary for our purposes anyway.”
“Easy for you to say. I’m still unclear about your purposes or even if your purposes match mine. All I seem to get are harrowing experiences with no resolution and no questions answered.”
“We can’t directly tell you. That is an eternal rule of engagement between the Malignity and those who want to thwart it. You have been bred with the ability to find the answers you need and then rearrange events for a more…desirable outcome.” Her lips barely moved when she spoke, but her eyes behind the frozen eyelids were active.
“I’ve been bred? What is that supposed to mean? What am I, a ranch animal?”
“Touch the pillar behind me. Utilize what you know.”
Remembering the last time she, without moving, had pitched me against a pillar, I dragged my tired self behind the dais and touched the pillar, closing my eyes while doing so. I opened them to the rubble of the destroyed tower where I had last seen Laura Bishop.
Pento stood motionless next to a large stone that had once been part of the tower. I cleared my throat, knowing that would wake or activate him. I still wasn’t sure what he was, so I settled on defining him as a benign, vaguely useful, robot spirit.
He turned toward me and jerked his arm aloft in greeting.
Before he could say anything, I said, “Where’s Laura Bishop?” I twirled and ran around the tower debris, scanning for any sign of her. I knew she had been in the toppled tower. She had to be there. “Tell me where she is. Now.”
“It changes every time you leave and return.” He was shaking his helmeted head, acting as if I should have known how things worked in his meshugana Theater. “Surely you understand how it works now.”
“No, I don’t. Enlighten me, please.”
“This is part of who you are, what you have been planned for. The lines have been established for countless millennia. They were established to balance the forces in your world and other worlds too. Our responsibility is to intervene when one line, in this case the Malignity line, gets too strong. We cannot enter your world, so we use other means to reach equilibrium.”
“What do you mean by ‘lines’? What is my role here?”
“Your role, the duty of your line, damsel, is to neutralize undue power of any other line. Look there.” He pointed to a figure on a low hill about two hundred yards away.
“What’s that got to do with lines?” I turned to find Pento gone again. “And what are ‘lines’ anyway?” I muttered as I started hiking, again in my slippers, across the synthetic terrain toward the whatever-it-was on the hill.
The familiar crunch and squeak of the “dirt” accompanied my ascent up the gradual hill. As I came closer, I was able to make out someone with a bowed head, looking at a table that was placed between him and me. I could see the glint of a few articles on the table, including a chalice. I was more intrigued by what looked like a dark red ribbon hanging straight down the front of the table.
I stopped for a moment, about a hundred feet from the table and the person whose head was still lowered. Once again, the inability to smell jarred me, and I felt ill-equipped to deal with whatever was coming at me. But I knew I’d need to confront this guy in order to continue on this bizarre quest.
“Hey, mister!” I called with an inadequate, flat voice.
Taking deliberate care and without lifting his head, he pointed to the ground with his right hand. Then he hiked up his left arm and pointed to the sky. I was looking at a tableau of the first major arcana tarot card, the Magician. He symbolized what a magician always is, a person who makes fantasy a reality, turns falsehoods into truths. An illusionist, a liar.
“Before the High Priestess comes the Magician. He-Who-Comes-Before,” I said softly. Then he raised his head and looked at me. A warped grin smeared his greenish face. A face so malevolent I couldn’t breathe. The red ribbon I’d noticed hanging from the front of the table originated from his hideous, perverted mouth. The ribbon streamed from his purple lips, off his chin, to the tabletop, then over the front side. The inch-wide red stream was trickling over the ground toward me. It was no ribbon. It was blood. And it was pooling at my feet.
I screamed and looked up at the Magician. His hair was the exact pompadour hair I’d seen Jerry Greenfield sport on television and the one time I’d seen him in person. Anger and disgust burst from me, and against any impulse I had ever experienced before, I attacked.
I tore up the hill toward him wanting to rip his face off. The blood that had drizzled from his mouth soaked into my socks. The dirt gave way beneath me, and I fell onto my knees. I looked at my hands buried in the blood and found myself looking at the ceiling of my study. Pre-dawn light made the room gray and colorless. I loosened my hands from gripping my thighs.
“I am so stupid. Greenfield. Of course,” I said to the moth that was helplessly batting the light fixture in the middle of the ceiling.
Chapter Eight
After that distressing trip to the Theater, I schlepped my drained body into bed for a few hours of unsatisfying sleep. When I awoke, it was midmorning on Tuesday, a banal time to start a serious, possibly deadly, mission, it seemed to me.
Sipping decaffeinated black coffee and cursing my lactose intolerance, I settled at my desk and pondered the situation I’d gotten myself into. This
was far bigger than some aging movie star learning, from my visions, that his hairdresser was going public about the hair implants. It was not like a derailment of a bodyguard who boffs the starlet in the limo and then threatens to release videos to the tabloids. Those kinds of events were easy to pre-empt.
Being conscripted by the High Priestess to avert some intangible disaster that I couldn’t grasp was beyond my skill set. However, I had learned something crucial in my last trip to the Theater. I was given the unmistakable message the Magician gives all card readers when he points to the air and the ground simultaneously, the ancient alchemical message, “As above, so below.”
What happened in the heavens also happened on earth. Spiritual and physical reality mirrored and informed each other. To focus on one side at the expense of the other was to dwell in extreme peril. From this, I concluded several things and castigated myself for being such a schlemiel for not having realized it right away.
I was developing an unproven hypothesis. The Theater was really that: a theater. I was its spectator. It was a place where the war in the alchemical world, or heavens if you like, was projected to me. A colossal multidimensional screen. Most likely, the cosmic energies involved used tarot symbolism because that was what I understood best. Were I a deep faith Christian, I’d probably see angels and devils locked in eternal combat. If I were immersed in Scandinavian mythology, I’d see Loki and Thor squabbling. The forces of good and evil, and those in between, engaged in an ancient battle for dominion. Dominion of what, I worried.
I knew I was in the middle of a cosmic and earthly game of tic-tac-toe. Not the one that you play with a friend on a scrap of paper while waiting to board an airplane. This was the tic-tac-toe played in three or more dimensions. Like the one with three levels and marbles, where so many contingencies have to be considered before making a move. A game where you are sure that you’re missing something that will cause your sudden and mortifying defeat, and it’s often true.
I poached an egg and slid it on top of a piece of toasted millet bread. When I finished eating, I had a plan for the day. I settled at my desk and grabbed the phone.
“Fitch, I thought I’d call you before I look for Laura Bishop and hear what you’ve dug up on her and the Smith Tower killings. Tell me what you know.”
Fitch started relating information about Laura Bishop. “I have lots of information. She’s a clean gal. No crimes, just a couple parking tickets. She is a lesbian who doesn’t use online dating sites, but she does visit sites about lesbian culture. Her other frequented Internet sites center around lefty news, you know, like the Huff Post. No indication whether she has a girlfriend or not. haven’t checked her shopping habits yet but I’ll get to that. Her activities seem limited to numerous charities she supports and her pricey legal practice. A family law attorney and as good as they come. Lots of well-heeled clients but does her fair share of pro bono work for women and kids in shelters. Definitely not a tool of the extreme Christian right, anyway.”
“Possible enemies?” My excursions to the Theater made it clear Laura Bishop was in danger, but from who and why? And what happened at Smith Tower, her office building, two days ago? I withstood my impatience and let Fitch deliver the information systematically.
Now Fitch’s voice sobered a bit. “Lots of potential enemies. Family litigation dredges up the worst in people. Fighting over kids and property has become a bloody national sport. She has had her share of online death threats and a few through conventional mail and telephone calls. Fairly routine occurrences in her profession. Who knew? All threats were duly reported to the police and handled appropriately from what I can tell.”
“No current or ongoing threats?” My mind kept rewinding and replaying the sight of Laura Bishop calling for help just before that tower fell.
“Here’s where it gets interesting and where I deserve my reputation, Devy.”
“Don’t call me Devy. I’m not a Devy. Okay, prove once again what makes you the macher of cyberspace.”
“I am the queen tuna of cyberspace because I know when to leave cyberspace and make a few phone calls. I thought Bishop would probably have some security, at least at her office, protecting her from the marauding ex-spouses she has litigated against. One call and I hit it big.”
“Who did you call?”
“The manager of the security firm contracted by the Smith Tower is a long-standing, active member of the BDSM community. You should see her in vinyl, a sight for the ages. Anyway, she told me Smith Tower was vandalized last night, and the damage was located in Bishop’s office. Here’s the bad part.”
“Let me guess. Three people were murdered, and it was Laura’s office that was vandalized. Who was killed?” A crushing foreboding filled me as I imagined Laura Bishop lying dead in a marble hallway in the Smith Tower.
“Three security personnel had their throats slit. Cleanly. No struggle. Caught completely unawares. Whoever did the deed had been hiding in the building when it closed. All this is in today’s papers, but there’s more that didn’t make the news.” Three security personnel were dead, not Laura Bishop. I felt relief tinged with sadness for the poor guards who died just doing their jobs.
I focused again on Fitch. “Don’t tell me what you had to promise to get this next bit.”
Fitch was adept at trading use of her private dungeon for favors from people who liked to keep their kinks under wraps. Like the GLBT culture, there was an unseen BDSM culture that operated, unnoticed, under the noses of the average citizens. They supported each other’s businesses and helped each other out when needed. I was beginning to think half of Seattle’s couples kept sex torture toys in their bedside tables.
“Each guy had the letter I carved into his left cheek. Apparently done postmortem. But it gets more relevant and more off the record than that. Laura Bishop was there.”
“Damn, why didn’t you say so right away? Fitch, you know she’s—”
“Wait, wait. She’s okay. At least, she’s in Harborview Hospital, unrevealed to the press, and doing fine. She just happened to stumble into the whole scene. Her office was being ransacked and she walked into it. She saw the guy. He threw something at her, knocked her out, and carved the same I into her cheek. Bishop had called nine-one-one before being attacked. The police tracked the cell phone signal. The attacker either thought she was dead and left, or he was scared off. Anyhow, he got away, but they think he’s taken a ferry somewhere.”
“Who got a look at him?” I knew it had to be Laura who helped the police artist make that drawing of the swastika skinhead.
“Bishop did. Big Nazi-looking dude. Buzzed hair. Gold-crowned tooth. A twisted cross tattoo on his neck. Sounds like one of the bastards that harassed me out on Lopez Island the other night while you were doing hoo-doo with Elizabeth Stratton. How much you want to bet he’s the same guy?”
“Stratton again. What a farshtinkener day when I opened my door to that woman. I wonder if Laura Bishop was left for dead and they don’t know she’s alive and well at Harborview.”
“We’re talking Senator Elizabeth Stratton, wife of Jerry Greenfield, owners of a giant empire of bedroom snoops. If she doesn’t know yet, she will soon enough, and Laura Bishop will be in big trouble. I had to dig, but I got all this information. No reason Stratton’s toadies won’t do the same.”
“I’m going to see Bishop. Any idea what room she’s in, or am I pushing my luck with your skills?”
“She’s in room 445 West. Getting that piece of information is child’s play. But just so you know, it’s a secure wing. Good luck getting in.”
“I have my trade secrets too, Fitch. Dig around on Stratton. We need more.”
“Already in process. I’ll call later.”
When I hung up, instead of jumping into action and going to Laura Bishop, I sat for several minutes and pondered the agreement I’d made with Elizabeth Stratton. I’d never dishonored an agreement with a client, never even questioned the moral ramifications of my meddling. It was a
winning formula, one that made me wealthy. Was there any reason to change? Was Elizabeth Stratton any more of a hypocrite than my other clients? Oh yeah, she was. In fact, Stratton and her Elmer Gantry of a husband were worse. They wanted to control the whole country. No, they wanted to control people.
And there I sat, a skinny Jewish girl who, science would claim, was experiencing psychotic hallucinations telling her to save the world. Regardless, all the years of studying paranormal phenomena helped me to trust my experiences with the High Priestess, Pento, and the Theater. To my core, I knew what was happening to me was real.
But who was I to take this on? Why me? Why now? Then I remembered the famous quote from Rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” For the first time in my life, I was doing something noble.
“Go figure,” I said.
*
Several years ago, I conducted a reading with a client who was a nurse at Harborview Hospital. I had a vision that she would be busted for drug use in the near future. She gazed at me, shocked, as I relayed the image of handcuffs wrapping her wrists and she being wedged into a police cruiser.
“Actually, it’s not me using drugs,” she said. “It’s my boyfriend. I…I steal drugs from the hospital for him to sell. I don’t dare stop. He’d hurt me. You have no idea.”
I told her that I certainly did have an idea about what kind of trouble her boyfriend was. I offered my services to send her boyfriend in another direction and get him out of her life. She was broke, having given all her money to, of course, the boyfriend. I wasn’t above a convenient barter.
I knew men like that piece-of-dreck boyfriend were essentially cowards. He had his girlfriend do his dirty work, lived off her paycheck, and beat her to boot. He was a spineless loser. So I offered the pitiable nurse a trade. She would owe me some favors for a few years, and I’d redirect the boyfriend. I would get my own form of hospital privileges, and the boyfriend would ditch town when served with a convincing, yet phony, threat from the local underworld. Spotless, nobody hurt. It was that grateful nurse who smuggled me into Laura Bishop’s hospital wing.
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