The Fortune Teller's Daughter

by Lila Shaara

  Miss Tokay took a moment to think about this. “Papers?” she said.

  “Yes. Notes regarding her work there. I assume that’s where she keeps them.”

  “Oh,” she said, her head bobbing in comprehension. “Her notebooks.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Eureka, he thought.

  “They’re all in the temple, as far as I know.”

  “The temple?”

  “Yes, that’s where she’s always worked. In the temple. Of course I don’t use it as such anymore. Such a shame. The Sky People are going to see that I ascend quite soon, myself. Life is change, I know that, but sometimes it still makes me sad, seeing the temple transformed from a place of worship and wisdom and joy to a place of belts and pulleys and motors. But that’s wisdom of a kind, too, I know. Joy, too, at least to Maggie. At least sometimes.” She stopped. She’d been looking in his direction, but her attention had been on her own thoughts. Now she focused on him and gave a small smile. “Do you understand anything that I’m talking about, honey?”

  Jonathan gave a small laugh. “Not really, ma’am. But I’d love it if you explained it to me.” Her smile spread across her face and he thought that, when she was young, she must have been a looker; even through the wrinkles and the death that were all over her face, the smile was beautiful. Not as beautiful as Emily’s, to be sure, but sweet enough to make you speculate on her past. That’s how she got followers, he thought; she beguiled them with her beauty.

  “I’m speaking of spiritual matters,” she said. “I don’t know if you hold with such things.”

  “I have a degree in religious studies, ma’am. It sounds like you’re in the tradition of Madame Blavatsky and the Society of the Golden Dawn.”

  “Oh, yes. I didn’t expect such sophistication in metaphysical matters from a Yankee boy such as yourself, if you’ll forgive my being so blunt.” She smiled again. “Your mother must be very proud, such a fine-spoken fellow as you are.” That’s when Jonathan decided for sure he wouldn’t kill her.

  They talked for an hour or so, after she’d apologized for not having any refreshments to offer him. “My niece and her husband consumed everything that was worth eating,” she said. He assured her that he didn’t require anything. As she told him more about the Sky People and the Ascended Masters, he nodded intelligently from time to time, letting her do most of the talking; this seemed to please her. “You know, everything in the universe has consciousness. Not just the things we normally think of as living. Even the rocks and mountains and water are alive. It’s just that the life processes of some things move at such a slow pace, we don’t recognize it.” She gave him another one of her smiles, and he could see her girl-face again in the shadow of the one she looked through now. “I’ve enjoyed this. Thank you for tolerating me.”

  He assured her that he’d enjoyed their conversation as well, which was only partly false. He’d been interested in spite of himself because he loved the minds of others, especially when those minds wandered all over sanity like lost boats on the sea. “But I do need to be going, ma’am. I hope we can talk more soon. But for now, if you’ll allow me to take a look at her papers, that would be great.” He stood up. “I’ll take the lamp now and put it in my car.”

  “Why don’t you get it as you leave?” she said, opening a wooden box on the small table in front of her. “I’ll gather some literature to give you.” The box tinkled a tune when the lid was lifted. “ ‘The Dying Swan’ from Swan Lake,” she added. “Tchaikovsky.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Jonathan. “It’s beautiful.” Valuable, too, by the look of it.

  “It’s Russian.” She pulled a bright gold key from inside the box and held it out. He leaned over and took it. “It opens everything,” she said. She asked for his help in standing; he came next to her and pulled her up by her child-size arm. It gave him the creeps how light she was, how thin and hollow her little bones felt. She followed him out to the hallway. He was about to walk out the big front door when she opened a compartment in the big grandfather clock that faced it. She pulled a large flashlight from inside the clock. “Take this,” she added. “It’s mighty dark out there. There are lights by the temple, but I don’t want you falling into the big sink out there. It can come up on you kind of quick. Make sure you use this when you’re unsure of your footing.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Jonathan said, giving her a smile almost as beautiful as hers.

  58

  THE EMPEROR

  REVERSED

  Control slips away. The Seeker may be seriously injured in the fracas

  The night was crystal clear, remarkably so for this time of year. Jonathan wondered if they got many hurricanes in this part of Florida. He was starting to miss the hills of Pennsylvania, where you could see for miles from even casual vantage points. Here, you couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction because of the trees. And the night was so dark, heavy and damp and black. The proximity of the town didn’t help; Stoweville was so small that its lights didn’t penetrate even the lowest part of the sky. He thought, Maybe I need to rethink living here. It’s awfully hot.

  The tapestry made by the sharp white stars was so bright that his eyes ached whenever he looked up, his pupils dilated with the effort to see through the trees. But there was no moon, and the stars weren’t much help in the woods. He let his eyes adjust, took his time. There was no need to hurry, no need to let haste cause blunders, and it was too muggy to move fast anyway. He walked slowly along the path the old lady had told him to follow, then saw the circle of lights girding the sinkhole. He remembered Wally Faber saying that sinkholes were favorite places to dispose of old appliances, and worse. In daylight, he would have taken a good long look, but in the dark, the sinkhole beyond the lights had all the charm of a black hole, the kind his father used to talk about, that could suck in an unwary astronaut or planet or star, elongating it like a grisly galaxy-size rubber band before tearing it apart. His father had always spoken with ill-concealed jealousy of Stephen Hawking, the physicist best known for his theoretical work on black holes and for his imprisonment in a body long afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease. “Steve’s got a brilliant mind all right. Maybe more so than Einstein or Feynman. But he’s completely impractical.” One time Jonathan had been at dinner at his father’s house, and Charlie had said, “You can’t fuel a nuclear generator with black holes.” Emily had responded in that smarty-pants way she had, “Not yet.” His father had gotten furious and stomped off to his study; he hadn’t emerged for several hours. Jonathan was pretty sure his father hadn’t spoken to his wife for at least a day after that. The memory gave him a peculiar feeling, a kind of wistfulness for something, although he wasn’t sure what. He didn’t miss those days, his teenage years, when he felt constantly undervalued, pushed aside, and discounted. But there was something there, some small warmth that he thought maybe he’d like to have again, although he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to get it. Maybe, he thought, maybe I could just talk to Emily, make her see that I’m really in her corner. I always was, just not in the way she wanted. Harry Sterling, a galoot if ever there was one, what the hell is she doing with him? Jonathan thought about Harry’s son, Dustin. What a pretentious name to give your child. But Ann Sterling, now there was a name. The name of a movie star.

  His thoughts had distracted him from his purpose, so he left the yawning black maw in the ground and again moved along the path, his once nice shirt soggy and sticking to his back. The chirping tree frogs were so loud that he couldn’t have heard a semi if it was roaring up the path behind him. It sounded like complaining, Jonathan thought, like millions of the little beasts were yelling at him to go home. Mentally he told them to go fuck themselves, then halted in midstride as the sight in front of him took his breath away. He saw what looked like a UFO landed in a clearing of the trees, a great black thing surrounded by lights, like something from a modern scifi blockbuster. “Holy shit,” he said aloud. The sound stopped the chirping of the tree frogs, and the si
lence was worse than their screaming. It was suddenly so quiet that he could hear his own blood hissing in his ears, the pump-pump of it lurching through his temples and the sides of his neck, his heart beating his ribs. “Holy shit,” he said again, mainly to hear something outside his body. For the first time in many years, the knowledge that he was absolutely alone discomfited him.

  He walked slowly around the big building, his eyes adjusting to the relative brightness of the lights around the damn thing. He could see that they were fueled with solar panels and thought, Emily’s been busy. How philanthropic, or maybe the old lady had paid her something. Although given the condition of the house, it was unlikely that she had much. Maybe she’s one of those misers, he thought, buckets of money in a toilet tank or in the freezer, but all she buys with it are solar panels from her neighbors. He grinned to himself, relaxing as the strangeness of the setting began to wear off. The tree frogs were back at it now, one having started and given the rest of them courage when they saw that it wasn’t smushed by a foot or tire or swallowed by a snake. He walked slowly around the odd, dark building till he found the door. The lights were all mounted high on poles, so what reached the deep carvings in the wood drew fine shadows around them, making them look as though they moved. Dancing doors, he thought; it sounds like a good name for a band.

  He pulled the key from his pocket and fitted it into the incongruously modern-looking lock in the door. Although the building didn’t really look old-fashioned. Rather, it looked other-fashioned, from no time that had ever existed or would ever exist. Bizarre. Insane, he thought, that’s the word I’m looking for. And the lock looks so common, like what you’d find on the front door of a suburban split-level.

  He turned the key and pushed the door open. He experienced a quickening of his circulation just as he had when the temple had first come into view. The darkness inside had a foggy, gray quality that the night itself lacked. He reached inside for a switch, wondering as he did so if the solar panels powered the inside wiring, and if there was enough juice stored up to light the place. He found what he was looking for just inside the door frame, a big box that jutted out from the wall, the unmistakable shape of a toggle switch on its face. He flipped it up, which took some effort; rust or dirt had caked around it. Nothing happened, but he thought with some alarm, Maybe I’ve just put my hand in some sort of insect nest encrusted around the switch. He pulled his hand back quickly; for a moment he had the sensation that something was crawling on it, but he held it in front of his face, turning it so that the light from the poles fell directly on his palm. He turned his hand over and over, looked up and down his arm, turning his entire body this way and that. Nothing walked on him, nothing was burrowing in his shirt. He pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hands. His mother had had him tested for every allergy known to modern medicine when he was a young teenager; the doctors had pronounced his immune system perfectly normal, able to distinguish genuine threats to his health from relatively benign intruders like pollen and bee venom. Nevertheless, the prospect of a spider bite or scorpion sting didn’t appeal at all. He found contact with insects generally repellent, and it certainly didn’t take a shrink to understand why. How could I ever live in Florida? he thought. There are more bugs than oxygen molecules.

  The old lady had warned him that parts of the floor were missing, so he went in only as far as the outside light reached. He smelled damp and mildew, heard some sort of liquid trickling and thought that the roof must leak, and that some rainwater must have been trapped between the roof proper and the ceiling during the last storm. He imagined tar-paper reservoirs of buggy, tea-colored water under the roof tiles dripping mosquito larvae and worse onto his head. Onto Emily’s head, too, since she works here all the time, and then he thought, So she’s sunk to this. She works in this hellhole. He wondered what she used for light.

  He took a small, careful step even as he pulled the flashlight out of a pocket with his right hand, the handkerchief still wadded in his left. He thought, I wish Miss Tokay was my grandmother, then turned the flashlight on, and something happened that he couldn’t have explained to anyone if he was ever to have had the chance. The room exploded into view, all in black and white, no color, although there was an impression of lavender, like you see in faded old photographs that have been tinted improbable faint shades, the years hammering them into almost nothing. There was a smell, too, ozone and melted rubber, and a sound, zing, quick and then gone. He had an instant of recognition, of some deep memory stirred; he’d seen this thing in action before, he’d seen this light, smelled this smell. But the memory evaporated as quickly as it had come and did him no good at all. He jumped and screamed and then felt his footing disintegrate, as though he was standing on nothing; he could hear wood creak and separate with a series of small groans in the same moment that the hellish flash went out. He had the sensation of falling, the quality of which was so nightmarish and bizarre that he wasn’t even afraid, couldn’t grasp the reality of what was happening enough to be afraid, couldn’t understand any piece of what his senses were trying to tell him. Complete blackness and free fall, a feeling that was almost of joy, of immense fun. Then he hit water, that he could tell at once, and it was so cold that he couldn’t breathe, which was just as well as it went over his head and he went down and down and down, and it was so dark he couldn’t tell where up was at all, even though he was sure his eyes were open since they felt like they had frozen solid.

  His arms and legs began to move in spasms, kicking and waving through what felt like liquid ice. His head finally broke free from the water, and he breathed in great gulps of thick, wet air. But he still couldn’t see anything except velvet black. He treaded water, one shoe gone into outer space for all he knew, the flashlight or whatever it was gone as well, as was his father’s handkerchief. As he felt the cold start to eat him up, he realized what had happened, or part of it. He’d fallen into one of those sinkholes, and he thought, The old lady, the motherfucking old lady did this to me, she gave me the goddamned motherfucking key. She’s dead, she has no idea how dead she is; I’ll kill her myself and won’t care if anyone knows it, she’s a goddamned walking corpse.

  59

  THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

  REVERSED

  Luck goes this way and that. You’ll get what you deserve

  Harry talked to Dusty again in the room while watching Maggie spread the Tarot cards out on the big bed. Her hands started shaking, and he cut the conversation short. “What’s wrong?”

  “I wouldn’t let her do a reading for me. Not for a long time now. I was going to the library, and I told her that if she didn’t stop drinking, it was going to kill her. All she said was ‘Something else’ll get me long before that.’ I got so mad at her and just left her, sitting in Miss Tokay’s living room with her cards. She was right. Oh God, Harry. If I hadn’t left, maybe everything would have been all right.”

  “And maybe you’d be dead,” he said, hugging her. “It’s my fault a lot more than it’s yours. I opened my big fat mouth to Gillian De-Graff. That’s why Jonathan came down to Florida in the first place and found you.” He let her cry for a while. His cell phone rang; she made him answer it. It was Miss Tokay.

  · · ·

  He knew he had to keep moving, so he began to swim, carefully propelling himself in what he thought was a constant direction, to try to reach the limestone wall. He’d left the temple door open, and now he could see tiny threads of light from above, although he was horrified by how far away they were; they looked as far away as the stars. He estimated that in reality it was thirty feet, maybe more, the faint light caressing ragged, sharp planks forming the giant hole way, way above him.

  He blinked to warm his frozen eyes and swam through water that smelled like moldy bread, and there were things in it, things he bumped against, lily pads or small pieces of wood, he hoped, although there was no way to know for sure. The water had a film on it, too, thick and greasy, and he could feel it clinging to
his chin and his hair; some got in his mouth, and it tasted of rot so he spit it out; his whole body shuddered with revulsion and what he feared was encroaching hypothermia. It’s summer, he thought. I’m in Florida. People swim in these filthy holes for fun. I’m freezing, but I won’t freeze to death. I’m alive, I’m healthy, I’m strong, I’m not injured. I can swim.

  He bumped against the side of the sink and patted the torn chunks of limestone, feeling shards crumble and cut his hands. There were indentations in the rock, but they were all wet and as slippery as if they’d been coated with oil. Algae, he thought, and some sort of bug, unused to being disturbed by anything as large as a human hand, chittered and ran across his fingers. He yelped and splashed away.

  He took another gulp of the greasy, thick water, choked and gagged, treaded water, moved his arms, and thought, I have to conserve my strength, I’ve got to keep moving but I can’t wear myself out. He had a vague memory of his father talking about work in terms of kilocalories, Emily gently correcting him on one point or another, and his hatred of her flared into a determination to live, to get out of this nightmare if only so he could kill her with his bare hands. Emily and the insane old lady and Harry the big galoot and his precious son and anyone else connected to them, who’d ever even smiled at them.