Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

“Probably Lou Ann bought me the wrong pack,” Zora said, but her voice sounded unsteady, as if she wasn’t sure that was the case.

  “All right, though, what does the card mean?”

  Zora kept staring at it.

  “Well, it can mean many things. Sacrifice, giving up, surrender, even passivity,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s what this one means.”

  “I don’t follow,” Kate said.

  “Everything is instinct. My gut says you are not the surrendering type and this card—this version of it—is about anything but surrender. I’ve never seen one like it. But the Hanging Man is also a doorway of sorts. He sees what others do not, from an angle they do not. In this case, he could be an opening to the Truth. To the mystical.”

  Kate wanted to look away and couldn’t. The image bothered her more than she wanted to admit, particularly the look on the Hanged Man’s face.

  “Isn’t he supposed to be peaceful?” she said.

  “In every other card I’ve seen, he is,” Zora said, looking up at Kate. She couldn’t be sure, but Kate thought Zora looked a little bit frightened. “This card isn’t like the others. It’s about a journey, one that may be quite painful for you. But it clearly denotes the start of something, something that will look like one thing but be another.”

  “Like a friend who isn’t a friend?” Kate asked.

  Zora nodded. “Or something that seems good, but isn’t. Or the reverse. The Hanged Man sees things in a different way—he sees what’s real.”

  “He looks like whatever he sees is terrifying him.”

  “Let’s just move on to the next card.”

  Zora drew carefully from the deck this time, as if she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to. With some hesitation, she put the card on the table.

  Kate didn’t need an interpretation. At a glance, she knew the card: The Devil. A horned, giant beast stood in the middle of the card, holding a trident in one hand and extending his arm to two human figures below him. There were a man and a woman on the card, both naked with horns of their own.

  Kate looked up. “If this is a joke, it isn’t funny,” she said.

  But Zora seemed more unnerved than she did.

  “The Devil can also mean many things: ignorance, stupidity, prejudice and pessimism,” Zora said. “But I think this one is about something else too. It’s about sex.”

  Kate took a look at the card. The human figures weren’t looking at the Devil—not even a little bit. Instead, they seemed to be staring at each other with a look of raw desire. Kate wasn’t sure how the artist could show it in such detail, but now that she looked at it, it was obvious the two wanted to have sex. And not the kind you see in the movies, or at least not the films she watched. These two people wanted to get it on right there and then and if the Devil was watching them, she doubted they cared.

  “Again, this version of the card is unique,” Zora said, her voice still unsteady. “The Devil often indicates sexuality, but this is more obvious than on some. There is another thread here as well: obsession and temptation. One thing I know: sex will change everything.”

  “I’m not exactly a virgin,” Kate replied.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Zora responded. “This—whatever this is—is different. Is there anyone you are attracted to? A boyfriend?”

  Quinn came unbidden into her thoughts. She had been about to say no, when an image of him popped into her mind. But she hadn’t looked at him that way, had she? No, he was just a friend. Then why had she kissed him? Why was she thinking of him now?

  “No,” she said.

  Zora was staring at her.

  “I don’t need to be a psychic to tell that you are lying,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kate said.

  “Not to me, it doesn’t, but it matters to you,” Zora said. “This is not your average relationship, that’s for sure. If you move forward with this person—if you have sex with him—the world will never be the same.”

  Kate tried to smile, tried to laugh it off, but none of it felt funny. The more she thought about Quinn, the more she realized she was attracted to him. She was breathing faster, her pulse rate up. She licked her lips. It dawned on her that she was very attracted to him and that scared the hell out of her.

  “Next card,” she said.

  Zora hesitated.

  “I don’t know that it’s a good idea.”

  “Look, we’ve come this far,” Kate responded.

  Zora reached into the deck and pulled out the card. Kate noticed her hands were shaking. She already knew what the next card would be. She had known it all along.

  The card showed a knight on a dirty, matted horse. The knight held a sword aloft and below him were the trampled bodies of kings, merchants and peasants. Women and children lay sprawled at his feet. The knight himself was a grinning skeleton.

  “Death,” Kate said. “Well, at least I know what this one means. Is it my death?”

  Zora looked back at her. She suddenly seemed worn and very, very tired. Kate knew she wanted to lie, was almost sure she was going to.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Usually, the answer would be a straight no. I would tell you this is a symbol and nothing more.”

  “But not this time?”

  “Honey, I’ve never seen these three cards together. The Hanged Man, The Devil and Death? That’s a bad combination.”

  “I’m really missing why you get any return business.”

  “Do you think I would fake something like this?” Zora said, and her voice was back to having a southern accent. “How stupid do I look?”

  “You could just be trying to frighten me,” Kate said.

  “There are two frightened people in this room at the moment,” she said. “Believe me when I tell you that whatever you are into, it’s some serious mojo. Truth, Sex and Death.”

  “Great, I realize the truth, have sex and die,” Kate said. “Sounds like a slasher film to me.”

  “The death card may not mean your death,” Zora said. “Typically it stands for the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. It’s about transformation. Taken together, these cards show a major event in your future, one that could have massive ramifications.”

  “Including my death.”

  “Yes, that’s a possibility,” Zora said. “But there are others.”

  Kate sat in stunned silence. She looked at the three cards. The man hanging upside down, the couple staring at each other, and the skeleton on top of the horse.

  Something gnawed at her about the death card, so she picked it up off the table. The message in the card was clear enough: death takes everyone—men, women and children, from nobility to serfs. The skeleton knight held a sword out in front of him and it was unclear if he had trampled his victims to death, or used his weapon.

  There’s something familiar in this, Kate thought. But she couldn’t quite place it. An image that was similar, but not quite right. It was on the tip of her tongue when she noticed a word written on the sword. The letters were hard to see and Kate had trouble making it out.

  “What’s this?” she said and pointed to the sword.

  Zora took the card from her and stared at it. She reached behind her desk and pulled out a pair of glasses. If you ignored the outfit, she looked like a librarian. Zora examined the word carefully.

  “Sanheim,” she said finally.

  Kate nearly grabbed the card out of Zora’s hands.

  “I know that word,” she said, and felt like the room was starting to spin. She had seen it written in the bathroom mirror just the other day. Then it had disappeared. And hadn’t she seen it before that? A memory flashed in her mind. Her mother was dead on the bed beside her and she was holding the phone. Lord Halloween’s note was below her. But instead of saying, “Happy Halloween,” or anything else, it just had one word: “Sanheim.” She must have seen it in her dreams.

  “What does it mean?” she asked. “What’s Sanheim?”

  Zora stared at her.

&nb
sp; “Sanheim was the Celtic God of the Dead. It’s also a festival celebrated by thousands every year.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” Kate responded.

  “Not under that name. But believe me, you know it. It’s the festival the early Christians renamed when they came to convert the Irish. They started calling it All Hallow’s Eve.”

  “Halloween,” Kate said under her breath. “Sanheim means Halloween.”

  Zora disappeared into the back for a moment and left Kate staring at the card.

  “This is about him, isn’t it?”

  Zora shook her head.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Come on. I get a death card with the word ‘Halloween’ on it and it isn’t about Lord Halloween? What are the odds of that?”

  Why does everything come back to him? Kate fought down an urge to run. She didn’t believe in divination—not really—but this was her worst nightmare in card form. She had always feared she would die at his hand and this appeared to bear that out.

  “Only in Loudoun do they connect Halloween automatically with that guy,” Zora said. “It’s a celebration that goes back centuries, far beyond the written history we have of it.”

  “You can’t deny it’s a strong coincidence.”

  “But it may just be that, Trina,” Zora said, and Kate winced again at the nickname. “I told you before, everything about being a psychic is instinct. When I first called you Trina, I knew from your reaction that there was something about Lord Halloween in your reaction. I still don’t know what, but I just felt it. It’s the same here—this card isn’t about him. His fate may be tied up with yours—I have a hunch it has to be—but nothing here says he’s going to kill you.”

  Kate pushed back from the desk.

  “I think I’ve seen enough in any case,” she said.

  She flipped off the recorder and stood up.

  “Don’t leave like this,” Zora said. “I’m sorry.”

  Kate didn’t say anything. She was shaken, and badly. Suddenly, nothing seemed too far-fetched. Could Zora be working with Lord Halloween? Is this all a trick to make her more panicked, more afraid?

  “I’m not working with him,” Zora said, as if she had read her mind. Maybe she had, but Kate didn’t care.

  “You had better not be,” Kate said, and there was venom in her voice. “If I find out you are, God help you.”

  Zora held up her hands. “I’m not your enemy,” she said. “I have a feeling that would be a very bad position to be in.”

  Kate nodded and turned to walk out.

  “There’s one more thing you should know,” Zora said.

  “I’m done listening to this,” Kate said.

  “The spelling—it’s wrong.”

  Kate paused as she began to head for the door. She almost turned around.

  “What spelling?”

  “The name on the sword here is Sanheim,” Zora said. “The Celtic God of the Dead is spelled Samhaim, similar sounding, but different.”

  “What does that mean? Maybe somebody forgot to spell check.”

  “I don’t know what it means, Kate. But everything here means something.”

  With that, Kate walked out the door.

  Zora sat at her desk after Kate had left. She had seen more than wanted to admit. A dead woman, lying on a bed. While the cards weren’t about Lord Halloween, she had seen something else, too.

  “He’s coming for you, Trina,” she said.

  But only her kewpie dolls heard her.

  LH File: Letter #5

  Date Oct. 15, 1994

  Investigation Status: Closed

  Contents: Classified

  Mr. Anderson,

  Half of the month is gone and from my point of view, much of it was a waste. Where is the mass panic? Where is the fear? Where is the publicity? I’ve killed seven people. You’ve written about four. You didn’t even mention the cop’s wife! Do you not know about it? You’re supposed to be a reporter, Anderson. I can’t hand you everything on a fucking plate.

  I can’t do everything, Mr. Anderson, and I’m growing so tired of waiting. I’ve encouraged you, warned you, even threatened you, and I get no respect. Are some of the articles good? Yes, they are all I could ask for. But it’s not enough. It’s not close to enough.

  I want speculation about me. Who am I? Why do I do it? Can the police catch me? All you have are straight-laced stories with no hint of speculation.

  How are they supposed to fear me if they never really know who I am? I chose you, Mr. Anderson, because I thought you would give flight to this fantasy of mine. We would be partners. But you are no partner at all. You’re just another parasite, another sign of the problem.

  So I’m through treating you gently. Write about me the way I deserve, or victim #8 will be familiar to you. Very familiar.

  Signed,

  Lord Halloween

  11

  This isn’t a date, Kate thought. She sat having dinner with Quinn and trying to convince herself over and over. She could see he thought it was. After all, he had asked, and she had immediately said yes. She should have thought more about it, with Zora’s predictions still hanging in the air, but she hadn’t. She didn’t want to be left alone to think of those Tarot cards and the false psychic. So here she sat, eating bites of her pasta primavera and wondering if she had slipped from the frying pan to the fire. Hadn’t those predictions been about Quinn? Shouldn’t she be trying to stay away from him?

  “So evidently I’m psychic,” Kate said for lack of something better to say. Quinn had almost appeared content just to sit in silence. Ordinarily, she would have loved that trait. She hated people who had to have conversation every minute of every day. But not today. Today she was worried the silence would strangle her.

  “Huh?” Quinn asked, not sure he had heard her right.

  “That’s what the great Madame Zora tells me, at any rate," she said and tried not to say it with any bitterness in her voice.

  “Someone has to tell you that you’re psychic?” Quinn asked. “I thought the point was that you just knew stuff.”

  “Yes, I thought so too,” Kate said. “It’s silly. The woman was... a fraud.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised. There are about a million stories about her in this town.”

  “She read my fortune,” she said, and was horrified she was talking about this. She hadn’t meant to bring it up, but it had just popped out.

  “Riches, romance and fame?” Quinn asked.

  “Truth, sex and death,” Kate said.

  “Your death?” Quinn asked, because he didn’t want to ask about sex. Or, rather, he desperately did want to do so, but was worried that was the wrong approach to take on a first date. “And this woman gets repeat business?”

  Kate laughed and it sounded forced to both of them.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Like I said, a fraud.”

  “You don’t sound too confident of that,” Quinn said.

  “Well, it was unnerving,” she acknowledged. “It isn’t every day someone tells me I’m going to die.”

  “I hope not,” Quinn said. “That would get awful repetitive.”

  Kate laughed at that and this one came out sounding genuine. She liked him. Her mind flashed back to the pack of Tarot cards.

  “How about you? What was your assignment?”

  “Terry Jacobsen, the local ghost hunter.”

  “That sounds decent, right?”

  “It was all right, if you believe in that kind of stuff. To be honest, it got a little technical for me. There’s a whole theory behind ghosts, involving electromagnetic fields and living people as batteries. It felt a little like science class.”

  Kate was smiling now. The feeling that she had at Zora’s was starting to fade. Now it felt like a bad dream. Cards don’t tell the future and psychics aren’t real. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. There was no reason to let it get her worked up.

  “Are there a lot of haunted houses
in Leesburg?” she asked.

  “He called it ‘the most haunted town in America,’” Quinn replied. “He and his team have been to nearly every house or business in the main center of town. He even claims the Chronicle building is haunted.”

  The smile dropped from Kate’s face. She had just been starting to enjoy herself. But now she could think of nothing but the vision she had seen in the printing press room.

  “Did he say what part?” she asked.

  Quinn looked concerned.

  “I wouldn’t take it too seriously. We probably have…”

  “Did he say which part?”

  “He just said the basement.”

  “Where the printing press is.”

  “Well, yeah, but…”

  Quinn stared at her.

  “Your vision,” he said. “I didn’t even think about it when he mentioned it.”

  “Well, it feels connected to me.”

  “Then there’s one thing else you should hear.”

  “What?” she asked, and she hated herself a little for asking. She didn’t want to know anymore. She wanted all of this to go away.

  “When I said I had trouble believing that, the guy just smiled at me. He said there have been complaints from some people. People who work there late at night.”

  “Complaints about what?”

  “I thought maybe people were just hearing the printing press. It can be quite loud and honestly late at night, it’s very creepy.”

  “Complaints about what?” she repeated.

  “I don’t want to freak you out,” he said.

  “Quinn, today a woman in a gaudy Middle Eastern dress turned up the three worst Tarot cards you can get during a divination, using a pack of cards she didn’t even know she had. I’m having constant nightmares reliving the murder of my mother, I have returned to the town of her death against all sane impulses and am constantly looking over my shoulder for a psychotic killer. Add to that a vision of a pool of blood in the workplace and I’d say I’m pretty freaked out already.”

  “Someone screaming,” Quinn said, and looked down. “They hear the sound of someone screaming.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “Then what I saw...”