The Game of Triumphs

by Laura Powell

  Yet all around her, the faces of the other players were suffused with a mixture of yearning and envy. A kind of reverence, too, as if this moment of victory was a sacred thing. And as the winning knight turned to leave, her hand clenched over her prize, the crowd parted to form an aisle of honor for her to walk out of the room. There was no more applause, just a long, soft sighing sound as the doors closed behind her.

  Further speeches followed, but Cat barely heard them. She was still trying to process all the things she had witnessed. Finally, she became aware that the doorkeeper was bringing events to an end: “… for the night is young,” he was saying, “and the Game is long. May Lady Luck favor you all.” He stepped toward the wheel. “Let play begin.”

  As he set the wheel spinning round, for a confused second the mirrored walls seemed to be whirling, too.

  There was a final cheer, and everyone began swarming out of the room. As Cat was borne along by the rush, she heard snatches of commentary. “The Devil hasn’t been attempted for a while”—“Or won, either”—“Yes, but if Cups take the Moon, they may draw level with Pentacles”—“Wands are pressing hard, but they lost another knight last week …” Meanwhile, the doors swung shut on the kings and queens. They were turning round to face the TV monitor, in which shapes and movement had begun to swim through the static.

  Back in the hallway, Cat stood aside to let the other guests stream past her. The party was resuming with new vigor—shouts and raucous laughter filled the house. The questions massing in her head were like a hundred spinning wheels, but she couldn’t think past them. All she wanted was to go home.

  She’d made it to the bottom of the stairs and was heading for the door when someone caught her arm. It was the boy who had whispered to her in the ballroom. “You can’t leave now!” he said, frowning. Her head ached and throbbed. She shook him off and stumbled across the black-and-white-checkered floor that seemed to sway beneath her feet, clawed her way past the muffling brocade and spun—at last—into the damp night air.

  Cat didn’t remember much of the walk home or what time it was when she tumbled, fully clothed, into bed. Sleep came instantly, her dreams crowded with feverish images. There was the knight on his horse, but instead of a skull he had the face of the King of Swords. She saw the wheel in the painting again, spinning, and sometimes the figure in the center was Bel, and sometimes her mother, and once it was the businessman from the Tube. One last chance, he told her. But I couldn’t possibly, she replied. It’s all for the Game. At one point she dreamed she woke up and saw the print of the wheel on her right palm glow silver-bright as it burned, burned into her skin like ice. And then she was falling among images that cascaded like a stack of cards: a floor like a chessboard, a ruined tower, a garden full of roses and a flaming sword behind.…

  “LOOK WHAT THE CAT drags in,” said Bel sardonically. It was past noon, and the winter sunlight coming into the kitchen made Cat groan and screw up her eyes. Bel didn’t have many rules, but those she did weren’t open to negotiation. Curfew was one of them.

  “Still,” her aunt continued, “you sounded perkier on the phone last night than I’ve heard you for a while. I’m guessing your end-of-term bash was a good one.”

  So she hadn’t stayed that late at the party after all—not if she’d been home in time to answer Bel’s ten-thirty checkup and make up some story to account for her evening. She didn’t have any memory of it. Cat wondered if she’d drunk more than she realized, even though she wasn’t actually hungover: just tired and rumpled and out of sorts.

  Bel started crashing the kettle and mugs around. “At someone’s house, you said. Any gossip, then?”

  “Not likely. Bad music and a load of geeks talking fantasy games.”

  “Ouch. Still, always good to put in an appearance.”

  Cat grunted noncommittally. She knew Bel would have enjoyed hearing about the real party: the swanky guests, the mansion, the champagne. Like something out of one of those glossy lifestyle magazines. The weirdo stuff with the wheel and the triumph cards would have made a good story, too; there wasn’t any reason she needed to lie about it. But as she squinted round the frowsty kitchen, with its clutter of unwashed dishes and Bel’s underwear soaking in detergent in the sink, the evening before seemed very far away. Unreal, almost … like the images from the picture gallery that had followed her into her dreams. Glancing down at her right palm, she was disproportionately relieved to see nothing but a faint, graying circle where the wheel had been.

  “Right,” she said. “I’m going to grab a shower. See you in a bit.”

  Bel looked disappointed, but she let her go.

  There wasn’t enough hot water for a proper shower, but Cat still took her time over it, standing under the tepid sprinkle until the last trace of fuzziness was washed from her brain.

  Once she got out of the bathroom, she found a note from Bel to say she was out shopping. Underwear still dripped in the sink; Friday’s evening paper was still strewn under the greasy remains of Saturday’s lunch. Cat stomped around tidying things away. She was annoyed with herself for getting spooked, for allowing herself—nearly—to be drawn in. Irritably, she grabbed the last of the newspaper and started stuffing it into the bin. Then her eye was caught by the headline: “Businessman’s Body Recovered from Thames.” And next to it, a photograph that seemed vaguely familiar.

  Police have confirmed that the body pulled out of the Thames on Thursday morning is that of London businessman Anthony Linebeg, 47. The body was found with multiple stab wounds in the back and had been in the water for approximately a week. Investigators do not believe robbery to be a motive for the murder, since the victim’s wallet and watch had not been taken. Linebeg, a freelance IT consultant, who lived alone, was reported missing after he failed to appear at a seminar last Monday.

  Anyone with information relating to the crime was urged to contact the police. A telephone number was provided.

  Cat didn’t know how long she sat there staring at the page, smoothing out the creases in the paper over and over. The photograph of the victim could have been of any middle-aged, balding guy in a suit; she couldn’t be sure it was the man she’d met. But all the same … Dead a week, they thought. She closed her eyes and once more saw that card—the blood, the black clouds, the cluster of blades: the Ten of Swords. How many stab wounds were “multiple”?

  Cat’s hand hovered over her phone, then returned to fidget on the page again. She both wished Bel was here and felt relieved she wasn’t. Bel had no patience with uncertainty: her decisions were instinctive and absolute. Yet Cat could find no certainties here.

  For the first time in a long while, she thought of her parents, and whether this was something she could have brought to them. Would they have believed her? What might they have done?

  Bel’s stories about her sister were nearly always taken from their childhood, not from Caroline’s life as a wife and mother. Cat could see from photographs that she had her father’s black hair and her mother’s gray eyes. But more often than not she thought of her own eyes as being like her aunt’s. Though Bel had always told Cat that her parents were good and loving people, and their life had been a happy one, this wasn’t enough to make their memory real.

  Sometimes she had dreams of being very small and held close by some unseen presence. When she woke up, a sadness would be within her all day, and also the sense that, if she screwed herself up to do it, certain memories could be brought to the surface again, where they would have shape and weight and warmth.

  However, that kind of thinking was morbid, and best left alone; that’s what Bel always said. It was certainly of no use to her now.

  In the end, Cat folded the article into her pocket and went outside, back to Dark Portal, where she found Too Cool for Tolkien enthroned at the information desk.

  “D’you have any books on Tarot?”

  “This isn’t a New Age store.” If possible, his expression was even more contemptuous than when she’d inquired abou
t role-playing games. Then, just as she was about to turn away, he cleared his throat in a grudging sort of way. “Though I s’pose you could try Reference.”

  The book section turned out to be in the basement, and was deserted. It was mostly sci-fi and fantasy fiction—everything from Arthur C. Clarke to the soft-porn exploits of space babes with laser guns. There was no reference section. However, the bottom shelf of the last bookcase was labeled MISC., and contained a step-by-step guide to building a model starship Enterprise, a book on the history of vampires and, stuffed wrong-side up next to an encyclopedia of Middle Earth, The Wondrous World of Tarot. Bingo.

  The book was not particularly wondrous in its appearance. Its pages were grubby; the jacket—a riot of lurid psychedelic swirls—was torn. If the overexcited introduction was to be believed, Tarot cards incorporated myths and symbols from prehistoric Norse tribes to the classical world, the ancient religions of China, India and Egypt, and the medieval courts of Italy and France. One theory was that the first cards were made by the deity known as Thoth to the Egyptians, Hermes to the Greeks, and Mercury to the Romans. As the scribe and magician of the gods, he created The Tarot deck from The Book of the Dead, imbuing the cards with the lost magic of antiquity. Cat wondered if the location of Temple House in Mercury Square was a coincidence, or if those people took all this stuff seriously.

  In any case, a lot of the references from last night were beginning to fall into place. The Arcanum, she now realized, must be some kind of allusion to the division of the Tarot deck into two sections: the Greater Arcana and the Lesser Arcana. The Lesser Arcana was fifty-six cards divided into four courts or suits, which corresponded to an ordinary card deck: Wands (Clubs), Cups (Hearts), Pentacles (Diamonds) and Swords (Spades). Each court or suit had its own Queen, King, Knight and Knave.

  The twenty-two trump cards (or “triumphs”) in the Greater Arcana were supposed to depict a journey through one’s life, starting with the Fool, designated as zero, and ending with number twenty-one, the World. The Fool was apparently the ancestor of the modern joker in the pack.

  The rest was mostly teach-yourself fortune-telling, or “divination” as the author preferred it. Cat wasn’t much interested in fortunes, but she did spend a while looking at the illustrated section in the middle, which showed pictures of all the cards, as well as a selection of Tarot decks through the ages. She was surprised to find that there were a range of different designs and even names for the cards. In some decks the High Priestess was depicted as a female pope, the World was called Eternity, Time was transformed into the Hermit and Fame into Judgment. However, the basic symbols and their interpretations seemed fairly consistent. She even found images similar to the paintings she’d seen in the gallery at Temple House.

  Cat flicked through the last few pages of the book with mixed feelings. In some ways, what had seemed strange and possibly threatening a short while ago was easy to dismiss once she saw its sources laid out in a tacky little book. All that hocus-pocus about ancient gods and Kabbalistic cults was the kind of thing she associated with your stereotypical Tarot fans: droopy girls with unwashed hair and too much eyeliner, burning incense in dark rooms. But then she’d always thought role-play games were for pimple-faced nerds living in basements.…

  Trouble was, she was no closer to understanding how the Game of Triumphs worked, or if it was connected to the newspaper article in her pocket. There certainly weren’t any guides to divination that could tell her what exactly she had seen, or not seen, that Friday night. She remembered the hunted man’s fear, but also his air of suppressed excitement, how he had clutched at her arm with greed in his eyes. And what was her real motivation here—her pricking conscience or curiosity?

  Lost in thought, she turned to place the book back on the shelf—and only then realized someone else had come into the basement and was leaning against the other end of the bookcase, openly staring at her. He was a boy of her own age, or maybe a year younger, with a clever, freckled face and an unruly mop of sandy hair.

  “I remember you. You were at the party yesterday.”

  She must have heard him wrong, or else it was a case of mistaken identity. “I don’t think—”

  “You know, the Lottery. I was explaining about the triumphs. The Moon and Devil.”

  The shock of his words brought home to her that she hadn’t yet reconciled last night with the ordinary world. She opened her mouth, but no words came.

  “Pretty wild, huh?” The boy gave an odd little giggle. “I’m Toby, by the way.”

  “Cat,” she said reluctantly.

  Close up, Toby didn’t look much like the poised, glossy guests that she remembered. He was wearing a battered tweed hunting jacket over a Godzilla T-shirt and baggy cords. The outfit was hardly radical in this neighborhood, but there was something a little bit staged, a little bit self-conscious about the way he wore it. He didn’t look entirely comfortable anyway, hunched into his jacket, one foot tapping agitatedly on the floor. “So, how did you first enter play?”

  “I’m not playing anything.”

  “You were there last night, weren’t you?” He gestured toward her right hand and she felt a brief twinge where the stamp of the wheel had been. Or rather, where it still was. She could have sworn the last of the ink had washed off in the shower, but now she saw that a smudgy gray circle still lingered. Reflexively, she put her hand behind her back.

  “Look, the only reason I was at that party was for the free booze. Sorry to be rude, but I think your gang’s little fantasy world is a load of crap.”

  Toby didn’t look offended. “Aw, don’t tell me you aren’t curious. Why else are you here?”

  Cat realized she’d left The Wondrous World of Tarot face out. And of course he was right. “Maybe I do have some questions.”

  “And maybe I have some answers.” He smirked. “Come here often, do you?”

  “No.”

  “But you live nearby? You’re a local?”

  “I guess.”

  “A Soho girl! Cool,” he said, a bit too eagerly, like he meant it.

  “All right then,” she said brusquely. “Tell me about this game of yours.”

  “I knew it. You’re hooked.” He leaned toward her, sandy hair falling into his eyes, and lowered his voice to a dark whisper. “It’s not just a game, you see; it’s a way of life—the gateway to another dimension!”

  An older man had come into the basement and was looking at the fiction shelves, but he gave them no more than a passing glance. Cat supposed this kind of conversation was standard-issue for Dark Portal customers. “Let’s stick with this dimension for now.”

  Toby took this as an invitation to begin. “As you know, the kings and queens are in charge of four courts: Wands, Swords, Cups and Pentacles,” he began importantly. “Each of the courts possesses a number of different triumphs. They’re the prizes. A knight has to play a round of cards to win them. Then, if he’s successful, he’ll win the triumph both for himself and his court.”

  “So it’s just a competition to see who can collect the most triumph thingies.”

  “Well, the knights are trying to win the power a triumph represents, but the kings and queens hold the cards. You see?”

  “Er … kind of,” she said dubiously.

  “Now, each card represents a test of some kind. Either you have to complete a task or escape a danger. Some cards are easy, and some are really nasty.”

  Cat nodded to show she was listening, a fixed smile on her face, as her fingers brushed the crumpled newsprint in her pocket.

  “Is that what last night’s Lottery was about? Swapping a nasty card for a nicer one?”

  “That’s the idea. Of course, knights hope the wheel will give them a better card than the one they’ve been dealt, but there’s always the risk it could be worse.”

  “And what kind of, er, knight are you—I mean, which court do you belong to?”

  “Ah, but I’m not a knight. I don’t play for any court, either. No …
I’m a chancer—a joker in the pack!” He gave a nervous giggle. “And you too, I think. That’s why I made contact outside the Arcanum.” He leaned toward her in a conspiratorial manner. “You see, now that the two of us are together, our alliance could have untold consequences for the State of Play.”

  Okaaay. Cat had had enough. She started edging toward the stairs. “Right, thanks for the explanation, then. It’s been … interesting.”

  “You’re not going already?” Toby’s face crumpled with disappointment. “But we’ve got so much to talk about!”

  “Sorry, but I really have to go.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe we should swap numbers, then.”

  She pretended she hadn’t heard him. After all, she was already halfway up the stairs. “I’ll leave my details by the Tarot book,” he called plaintively as she reached the top. “And I guess I’ll be seeing you around.…”

  Not if I see you first, thought Cat.

  But whether she liked it or not, Toby and his stories had got under her skin. His explanations only raised more doubts. And so, after leaving Dark Portal, she found herself heading for Temple House.

  It took a while for her to find it again. The square wasn’t off the street she thought it was, and she spent a frustrating half hour wandering around, trying to trace her route from the night before. And when she finally found it, the square was considerably less impressive than she remembered. The buildings looked shabbier in the cold light of day, their grandeur let down by ugly office conversions and dingy brickwork. The garden in the middle, which had seemed so abundant and mysterious in the dark, was just a scruffy grass space fringed by droopy-looking trees and a few shrubs.

  Temple House wasn’t as she remembered it, either. The paint on the door was peeling, the plasterwork cracked and stained. On a whim, she pushed the bell, but no signs of life came from behind the shuttered windows. A burger wrapper was half stuffed into the letter box. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought the place was derelict.