“Traitor,” she said under her breath.
A few minutes later she heard the dad’s van start up and creak and rumble off, ferrying him away from what she imagined could only be Part II of whatever the mom had been lecturing him on before she had heard Andromeda’s phone and interrupted herself to come by to investigate. Perhaps he had a late-night recording session—he did have those, sometimes.
Andromeda had meant to put in some time on her Language Arts journal, but she had forgotten all about it and it was now getting quite late. She skimmed over the photocopied handout. There was, as E. M. Butler’s Myth of the Magus made clear, a real, quite powerful magician behind the legendary figure portrayed as a kind of cartoon in the handout, and Andromeda was far more interested in this real magician than in the handout magician. In fact, she was slightly offended by how the handout’s author had decided to deform this reality in order to teach a trite lesson to “young people.” However, that was too complicated to get into. She wrote the following entry:
“Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”—King Arthur handout
This is from history’s greatest handout, Hi-lites from King Arthur. It is the police state, much like my mother from Australia, who is very annoying. Most people think Hitler was German, but a little-known fact is that he was actually Australian, which explains a lot.
It was whimsical, but too short; personally satisfying, if not gradeworthy. There wasn’t much more to be said on the subject, however. She had already turned in her essay on how her bones were cursed by God to Baby Talk Barnes this year, so that was out. Being utterly unable to draw pictures that looked like anything was going to make multimedia-ing it up a little tricky. If she had had Daisy’s artistic talent, she might have tried drawing a new version of the Two of Swords, the one she still held in her memory, though she realized it was false: a kneeling girl with smaller hands, a more detailed Andromeda Box behind her, and shallow pools everywhere. She could include a bicycle, and the Inter national House of Bookcakes in the background too, perhaps, and the St. Steve-like King of Pentacles or the High Priestess with Daisy’s face walking into the frame.
Just to show she’d tried, she began a sketch of what she was now thinking of as the “Two of Swords of the Mind,” and what she ended up with was: something that looked like a deformed sheep with antlers and around six or seven legs. She scribbled it out, and tore out the page and crumpled it up, but not before she noticed another difference between the Two of Swords of the Mind and the version of the Two of Swords drawn by Pixie, which was that Pixie’s card had a crescent moon in the background, while the moon she remembered had been more like a half-moon.
No, if she wanted to multimedia it up, she would have to cannibalize something else. She had under her bed a rather large collection of interesting found items she and Daisy had collected over the years. It had been one of their hobbies, collecting discarded shopping lists, letters, photos, doodles, and whatnot and using them to try to imagine the lives of those who had discarded them. Though Daisy had kept much of the best stuff for herself, and most of it would be unsuitable for the journal in any case, some of it might be usable. The prime candidate was material from the Emily File, a collection of drawings and other art that had been done by a previous inhabitant of the duplex. (They were unsigned, but Andromeda thought of the artist as Emily because Mr. Champlain downstairs had told her there had been a girl named Emily who had lived in their unit two tenants ago and she surmised that that would have been her.) She had found the large string-closed envelope containing them under a pallet in the carport when they had first moved in. She hadn’t looked at them in a long, long time, but she remembered them being pretty good. It might be possible to paste a couple of those in the journal notebook, here or there, to pad it out. She didn’t quite have the energy to dig through her underbed at the moment, however. It would wait till another time, if she got really stuck.
Even though she couldn’t draw most things, she wasn’t too bad at drawing sigils. So she got out A.E.’s Book of Ceremonial Magic and turned to the section summarizing the Goetia. She found a couple of sigils she liked from the Lemegeton, the Lesser Key of Solomon the Great, and copied them out as large as she could, each on its own page. The Seal of GAAP, and, in honor of the wicker girl, the Seal of AMY, a Being who is described as “a great President” and who comes first as a flame and next as a man. If these passed muster, there were seventy more Goetic Dignitaries to choose from, so if she played it right they could augment the journal pretty well for the rest of the year.
Enough homework for the night, then.
Dave was scratching at the door, so she opened it a crack to let him back in.
The weedgie mood had returned. She got out the Two of Swords again and placed it on the floor in front of her, half expecting the blindfolded girl to have resumed her kneeling position while she had been put away. But there she was again, hovering above the box, with a crescent moon in the background. What did they call it when it was a little more than half a moon? Gibbous. Best word ever. It was possible, or so the Golden Dawn taught, to transfer one’s consciousness to an astral image and enter the card as through a gate, rather as she had done in her dream. She stared at the card for some time but did not succeed.
“Time to put this day away forever, Dave, don’t you think?”
Dave responded with an unsympathetic stare, but he did lick her ankle.
Andromeda thought of all the tiny blindfolded, bound girls in the deck, imagined them squirming and shifting position on their cards, getting up and sitting down, even wriggling out of their bonds and leaving the frame when she wasn’t looking. Or of the Page of Cups or the Hierophant wandering around throughout Pixie’s tarot landscape as they had been doing in her dream, perhaps checking the blindfolds, making sure no one was peeking, maybe up to other mischief as well. She imagined the Tau-robed figure from the dream, tumbling and dancing through everybody else’s scene, casting spells to control the moon and cause the tides to fall and rise. She enjoyed a brief shiver at the absurdity and the slight ouijanesse.
She fell asleep thinking of herself in her box, iron mask bolted in place, a girl or boy with swords in enormous hands sitting or floating on top. No way was she getting out of there.
She was awakened by a knock on the box. The Two of Swords girl had gone, apparently, or had stepped aside to allow the knocker to knock. The box’s lid creaked open like a door. The hooded Tau-robed figure from the tarot dream was floating above her, with a silvery book in one hand and a kind of trumpet in the other. He blew the trumpet and sat down in a chair, and two angry men appeared before him and started yelling at each other. Then the robe fell open to reveal the heart beneath, punctured by two crossed blades; then the robed figure stuck another sword through it, down the middle, so that it looked like Pixie’s Three of Swords card.
“I am the King of Sacramento,” said a voice from within the robe’s folds.
It was realizing that she was still asleep that woke Andromeda up.
iv.
Most magical writing is deliberately obscure, designed to hide crucial matters from the uninitiated yet reveal them to those who know how to read the texts properly. Writers of such material often include blinds, deliberate inaccuracies to fool all but those who know enough to spot them. The occult literature concerning the tarot is full of such blinds. A.E. was a master of them. Even his language itself, each sentence, comprises a dense network of interlocking subordinate clauses and passive constructions that can be read in different ways depending on how you look at the matter. A.E., Andromeda believed, had been a kind of genius, but he was a genius who could be very tiring to read and who never seemed to mean exactly what he said and who always seemed to be mad at everyone.
Liber K would be different, Andromeda pledged, sitting on the toilet and leaning forward with her palms against the door to hold it closed and prevent any interlopers. It would betray the influence of A. E. Waite, no doubt, but unlike that of A.E., Andr
omeda’s prose would be notable for its lucidity. No blinds. All revealed in language as plain as the difficulty of the subject allowed. Millennia of error and nonsense corrected for good and all. This would ruffle feathers, naturally, and would make her a number of dangerous enemies. But hers would be the way of the future.
At times deftly worded phrases from this opus echoed through her head. They would come to her in snatches, like something blown her way by the wind. Or she would hear their cadence in her head being spoken in an English accent.
Andromeda imagined her future self standing in the center of the octagonal subterranean hall, lecturing for an audience of hooded students on the wisdom of Liber K. It would be a far different sort of world than the one she currently occupied.
There was only one bathroom in Casa Klein, and like all the rooms, it had a big round hole where the doorknob ought to have been, so you could see in, and it didn’t lock. The system was, if anyone started to open the door while the bathroom was occupied, the person inside was supposed to call out “I’m in here.” Andromeda didn’t like to take chances, so she always leaned forward against the door as a precaution, with her palms over the doorknob hole in case anyone tried to look in. She imagined a boy might be able to balance on one foot while holding the door closed with the other stretched out behind him, his back blocking the view; perhaps that was how the dad did it.
Wednesday was “collaboration day” at Clearview High School. The teachers had a planning period in the morning, and first period started forty minutes late. Wednesdays were difficult at Casa Klein, because the mom and Andromeda tended to be getting ready at the same time. It was much easier to wake up early and get out of there beforehand, as Andromeda did sometimes even on Wednesdays. The sound of the mom’s shoes clacking reproachfully up and down the hallway, the more distant sound of her blow-dryer cord slapping and clacking reproachfully against the wall, and of course the stream of actual reproaches that echoed through the house regardless of who might be there to hear them—it would shatter anyone’s peace of mind. It was best to stay out of the way if you could.
The dad was irrelevant; he never got up before noon.
There had been no dreams or visions of any significance since the King of Sacramento had revealed himself as the figure wearing the Tau robe on Friday night. The weekend’s attempts to scry with wine bottle and candle had yielded no results. She had had two shifts in the library, which she had spent catching up on her shelf-reading, working on the Sylvester Mouse list’s fiction section (every bit as impressive as the 000s and the 133s), dodging Weird Gordon’s sad attentions, and reading up on the Two of Swords. The Lord of Peace Restored, the Golden Dawn called it, though Mr. Crowley in his later writings disputed the “restored” part. In this view, it was best visualized as locked swords, a balance of conflicting forces, and hence a kind of peace, though an impermanent one. There was another theory that the cards in each suit in Waite’s deck told a story in reverse order, and that for swords, it was a story of a murdered knight and a sister’s unsuccessful attempt at revenge, leading finally to the Two of Swords, a grieving widow with swords at the ready to defend her husband’s body. To Andromeda’s way of thinking, this was a shallow approach, and a bit of a letdown if all the card was meant to convey was her own grieving. Of course she was grieving, and it didn’t take an oracle or the trappings of a secret tradition to point it out.
Her plan for that morning before school had been to attempt to charge a dream-generating sigil, if the mom would ever finally get out of there and leave her in peace.
She looked in the mirror and wished she hadn’t. Her hair didn’t look too bad right after blow-drying, but the not-too-badness lasted about ten minutes before it all began to degenerate, and the point of no return had been reached during the brief time she had been peeing. “You sure do sweat a lot, for a girl” was one of Rosalie van Genuchten’s charming recurring observations, though she often followed it up by saying she was just kidding. It was true, anyway. It was only when Andromeda was overheated or nervous, but she was practically always overheated and nervous, and they don’t make antiperspirant for your head, which was where she really needed it. She switched on the hair dryer to try to dry it again but instantly regretted it. At this stage, further styling only made it flatter. She had no time to reshampoo her hair and start over, as she might have done if she hadn’t had ceremonial magic to perform. She turned away from the mirror with an exasperated, Davelike growl-sigh and threw her sweatshirt hood over her head, pulling the string taut under her chin.
“You’re planning on going out in public like that?” said the mom, materializing in front of her. “Did you hear the fire engines last night? Another one of your Corona Slurpees and bastards. You really should be careful with your gambles, you could kill us all.”
“What?” said Andromeda, edging past her. The mom meant “aromatherapy disasters.” The police and fire department and the newspaper, like the mom, for reasons known only to themselves, preferred to blame such fires on unattended candles, though it was clear to anyone who paid attention what was really going on.
“They’re meth labs, Mom,” she said.
“Oh, look at you, then, Miss Meth Lab Expert,” said the mom. “My streetwise daughter. Drug labs all over Clearview, is that it? You just watch the camels.”
Andromeda headed to her room, deeply regretting that she was the only self she had and wishing she could conjure a better-looking, less sweaty servitor to go to school in her place and represent her in public. Crowley had probably done it all the time, and though he had tastefully refrained from boasting about it, she was sure A.E. had done it as well. How else would he have been able to read everything in the British Library’s collection and copy down all the manuscripts, and have a wife and family, and be a Mason and run secret orders and indulge in wild, debauched rambles through the countryside and write so many books? The real A.E. stayed in the British Library reading room, and the look-alike servitors handled the rest. That had to be how it was done.
Andromeda’s powers at the moment were, however, sufficient only to enable her to reach the end of the hallway and enter her bedroom without being able to make out the instructions and complaints the mom was shouting back at her as she clattered down the main stairs and finally slammed the outer door. Being a little deaf had its rewards.
Andromeda Klein waited with her back against the door till she heard the mom’s car start, die, then start, die, and then start again and skid off, before she let out her breath. She had no more than an hour of peace ahead of her.
She closed the curtains on the bedroom window and drew the curtain in front of the door. She had sewn them herself out of floor-length black velvet. The room was in nearly complete darkness when they were properly closed. She lit a single white candle, wriggled out of her clothes, and put on her white silk Tau robe, another item she had sewn herself. She hung around her neck on a purple thread a lamen of parchment, depicting the current version of her personal seal in ink, a large M in a circle and the word Imperfecta spelled out in Theban characters from Agrippa’s book running counterclockwise around the outside. She had been thinking of updating the seal to include the Lord of Peace Restored, i.e., the Two of Swords, in some way, if that card continued to resonate and signify her; perhaps the two crossed swords forming the V of her M, a box below and a pair of veiled eyes in the center of the M’s V, but that was something she was still working on.
Her card table became a cubic altar once she had draped it with a white silk cloth. She placed the candle and a small piece of banded agate, a type of chalcedony formed by layers of quartz, on the altar in front of her. For a pantacle, she drew out the tarot trump Justice and laid it in the center of the altar. She poured a small cup of wine from Daisy’s scrying bottle and placed the bottle directly in front of the candle. At the proper distance the flame of the candle shone red-yellow-black through the bottle and appeared to float in front of it above the table. The ghost light confused the senses,
and Andromeda could well imagine that a talented or well-trained scryer or astral traveler might be able to see or pass through the space between the lights, to a plane beyond this. It would be like crossing your eyes and entering the space between the overlapping images, which she was sure could be done.
Daisy had been able to scry quite impressively through the bottle, though Andromeda had never had results. But it did create a magic, weedgie mood, which was as important as anything.
After performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and consecrating the hastily constructed temple and altar, she sat down at the table and began to construct a sigil based on the motto THIS IS MY WISH TO DREAM OF THE KING OF SACRAMENTO. In modern sigil magic, the practitioner usually begins with a phrase embodying the Will, reduces it to its essence by crossing out the double letters, and forms a sigil from the remaining, unique letters. Like so much contemporary practice, this technique is merely simplified, personalized, no-frills Agrippa, but one thing in its favor is that conducting it requires no special training or education, and it is supposed to work just as well. One problem is that, because of my and will or wish, Ms and Ws are overrepresented in most such sigils, and it requires considerable creativity to distinguish the sigils from each other when you have done a great many of them. Andromeda had done dozens of sigils calling for the affection or the return of St. Steve, and they were all dominated by Vs and Ws, because the Ss, Es, and Ts cancel out and Vs are rare. You weren’t supposed to think about this or correct for it when formulating your phrase, or to think about the sigils or preserve them after charging them, though she retained the designs in her magical diary for future reference if necessary. Nevertheless, she had tattooed some of the good ones in a small spiral around her left leg, just below the unicursal hexagram she had done on her hip. She hadn’t done a St. Steve sigil in quite some time. Realizing this made her sad, but she shook it off.
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