The Unbinding -- Chapter 2

 

Chapter 2

 

 

Nobody else seemed affected, but I was shivering in the new gloom hard enough to make my back teeth clench. Not quite teeth-chattering, but definitely in that bracing discomfort area of cold.

The medium I was set to see was about a block south of the main street, on the corner, near one of the town's meditative pocket parks.

St. Cyperian was so sweet it had meditative pocket parks peppered everywhere. I thought I'd enjoy them, and their statuary, but I was uncomfortably cold.

The air got colder and heavier as I trudged the short distance to the address. Chills plucked my spine, and I felt like something was breathing on me.

I turned around and staggered because a pure dark cloud kissed the pure blue sky like layers in a sandwich.

I'd seen plenty of weird weather. Heck, it rains on only one side of the street some days. I expected to turn and see a fast-moving rain cloud pushed in from the gulf, a lonely rogue on the way to the ocean.

But no.

It wasn't that.

It was a slice of black cloud, winter black.

I stood, bewildered as shit, and pulled my phone out to take a photo. This was no sky sandwich; it was a weather Oreo, with a single layer of bad weather right over me.

Just as I snapped the photo, a woman called to me. She was my mom's age and reminded me of the version of Martha Stewart who went to prison and said "It's a good thing" – way before she became a geriatric babe who smoked out with Snoop Dogg.

"Honey, come in here. Now," she said.

Not-Martha walked to me and grabbed my bicep. She was strong for an older woman. I almost made a weed joke, but the closer I got the more I realized she only had the Martha Stewart haircut. The rest was different. She had elegant, slim facial features, a pert nose and deep blue eyes. Her hair was not naturally blonde if her eyebrows told any truth, but it looked perfect on her.

She wore a lot of makeup. It was tasteful, but a lot. 

"Honey, you are freezing, come in the house, now," she said.

She led me to a normal looking house as the shivers took me over and my teeth did indeed chatter. It was, ironically, the place I was looking for.

Her door sign read Grace Smith, Spiritual Medium, Tarot.

"I was looking for you," I said.

"I know," Grace said.

That didn't strike me as odd, because, you know, psychic. But the cold that struck me like a club in the face did. I shuddered and doubled over. The cold on my shoulders felt too heavy to carry. Grace said something and half dragged me through her door.

The door slammed shut as I stumbled over her threshold, hard enough to rattle the windows. There was a weird electric buzz, like an old fluorescent light bulb left on too long. Then the buzz stopped and the cold dropped off. My skin was still freezing, but I was in the house, and even with the air conditioning on full blast it was warm.

Grace's front room was clean, homey, with an altar of some sort near a fireplace and a round, polished table. It smelled like incense and patchouli oil and cinnamon sticks. She threw a fuzzy blanket over my shoulders and rubbed my cold hands between hers.

"That was a lot of spirits," she said. "You OK?"

I nodded and exhaled.

"I made you tea, I'm going to grab it and we'll get started."

Grace sat me on a little love seat at the back of the room. I rubbed my hands together. I didn't remember the flyer saying tea was part of the package, but I’d pay any upcharge for something warm in my hands.   

She came back with the tea.

I sipped it, staring at the crown molding in her home. The tea was perfect. Apple spice with a dollop of honey. Warm and homey.

I was halfway through the cup when the chill came back, but just down my spine.

"Why did you have tea ready for me?" I asked.

Grace smiled. She was a beautiful older woman, and there was such an air of calm around here that I smiled back. She had three large rings on her right hand, two had polished black stones and one had a lavender stone. Grace twisted the rings with her thumb as she answered.

"Spirit told me, honey. Said you were on the way, and you'd need some help to find your way," she said.

"And Spirit said I liked apple spice tea?"

Grace fixed her rings, sat at the table, and pulled out a case. She laughed.

"No honey, but it's caffeine free and most people like it. Come on. Let's get you a reading."

"Oh, I have a coupon! I had one. I think I lost it," I said.

She patted the chair.

"The QR code is on the table. You can pay me for your questions when we're done. But first, Spirit has a message – on the house."

She opened the case revealing eight different tarot decks.

"Pick the one that calls you," she said kindly.

I sipped my tea and touched a deck of cards that had two blond children on the front. It looked like an ethereal field.

"The Hollow Spring Deck," Grace said. "Good. Good."

The deck's borders had slightly tarnished gold foil gilded around the edges. The scenes were illustrated in oval windows, like seed pods, and human figures threaded with vines, as if remembered by the very earth.

She shuffled the deck for a while, and her face moved as if she were having an imaginary conversation with herself. Grace fanned the deck, face up, so we could see the cards, and in a Vegas-style flip, she turned the deck and gathered it.

"I need you to shuffle a few times," she said. "The deck wants to meet you." 

I picked the cards up, and they were slick in my teacup-warmed hands. I shuffled a few times.

"Do I ask a question?"

I paused mid-shuffle because I felt like I heard my own voice amplified and reverberating on the word question. The weird buzzing echoed for a moment and receded like a wave.

"Not yet. Spirit needs to talk to you," she said. Grace held out her hand. I passed the deck. She shuffled ten more times and then asked me to cut the cards.

"OK. From here, Spirit will talk to you and I'm just here to assist."

She shuffled and a card flew from the deck and landed face up in front of me.

Judgement.

In this deck, instead of an angel trumpeting and calling figures from the grave, a stag crowned in budding antlers made of bone and blossom called figures from the earth – their bodies woven with gold vines.

Grace cleared her throat and kept shuffling.

"The Judgement card is a call beyond the grave, Andrea," Grace said.

"It's Andy," I said automatically.

The card vibrated, as if we'd scooted the table and the legs jiggled it. I pulled my hands back from the table so fast the teacup fell and broke.

"Did you do that?" I said.

I heard a sort of voice reverberation, like my words weren’t just in my throat.  

"Are you doing that?" I asked. My hands shook as she continued shuffling. She didn’t react to the broken mug or the tea leaking across the floor.   

"Something is calling you back," Grace said, still shuffling. "The Veil isn't here, it's open to you, Andy. They're summoning you."

She paused and touched her rings with her thumb around the cards. Grace seemed to listen to someone seated next to her. I thought I could hear whispers like someone psspspspspsing to a cat really far away.

"Spirit doesn't know what your connection to The Veil is, but you are being summoned."

I pushed further back, my chair legs scritching on the carpet, and five cards flew from her deck like confetti.

They landed and righted themselves so that they fell in order.

Grace slammed the deck and hugged herself.

The first had a barefoot youth in pale linen standing on thawing ice as a white fox tugged his hem.

"Wow, this is a lot," she said. "OK, The Fool reversed, Spirit says beware the light charlatan. You'll be led by someone who pretends to guide you, seemingly harmless intentions, but devastating consequences. You can't close this door again."

The next card was a smiling skull on a lush field with resting lambs. Early crocus blossoms curled through the skull's eye sockets and the lambs' shadows looked like wolves.

"Death."

"I'm going to die?!"

"Death rarely means death," Grace said. She took a sip of her water. "Transformation. You can't stay the same. Spirit says there's a being that can't rest and it's drawing others to you. It's calling.”

The card slid across the table and landed on my lap.

I screamed and Grace stood, turning over her chair.

"Stop!"

"It's not me," Grace yelled back. The calm aura around her flickered and I saw fear in the corners of her tightening mouth. "Yes. We're finishing. We're finishing. And then she's leaving."

Our chairs both righted and nudged to the edges of our legs. I felt obliged to sit. I also felt like pissing my pants.

The card leered at me; a figure in dark green robes in a glade with black sap dripped down his wrist, as the other hand pushed into the earth. On a blanket in front of the leering man lay a bone-handled knife, a bowl of water and a cracked mirror.

"The Magician reversed – a dark charlatan. It feeds on what you have, and it's dangerous, more intentional, it wants you to bleed out on truths that destroy you."

My lungs were a runaway freight train, and I felt lightheaded as I hyperventilated. Grace stared at the cards and read them as if she'd never seen them.

"The Lovers, you're fated to meet someone whose connection transcends the living and the dead, but the bond can only be forged through shared awakenings…" Grace curled her hand in and rubbed her rings against her chest as The Lovers, two figures back-to-back in waist-high grass, their spines glowing gold where they touch.

She continued, "The High Priestess…"

The doors, cabinets, drawers, and windows in the house all slammed at once, and I screamed. Grace whimpered and gritted her teeth.

Ice crystallized in my lungs. The woman in the card sat at the edge of a frozen pond on the first day of spring. Her eyes were closed. Reflected in the icy slush were eyes that looked just like mine.

"Andy, the spirit world marked you," Grace said. She set the deck down and rubbed her hands together, as if washing them. "Choose carefully who you trust as you listen to both worlds."

"I have to go," I said, pushing away, trying to catch a breath. My eyes were on the jittering tarot deck.

"You have to go!" Grace repeated forcefully, without looking at me. "She has the message. I'm not the guide."

I took a step back, and the decks exploded across the floor, seven sets of cards laid out to form a row of cardstock steppingstones to the door.

"I think I'm going to faint," Grace said. "Please call for help if I do."

It wasn't seven sets of cards from the Hollow Spring Deck.

In a path to the door, six cards from each of the remaining seven decks in Grace’s tarot box were lined up in front of me. I had to step over each.

Not six new cards from the deck, but the same six cards from all of them. A classic Rider-Waite deck, a deck that looked like angels and demons, a deck with a steampunk theme, a Gothic deck, and a Baroque deck. Each deck vomiting out the same message, unbidden, over, and over, and over.

The Judgement; The Fool, upside down; Death; The Magician, upside down; The Lovers, and The High Priestess; all leering at me.

I heard Grace moan as I stepped over them, hopscotching my way out of this entire shitshow.  

The house shuddered and the cards hissed as I stepped over them to get the hell out of there.

This was a trick. A good one. But I was fucking scared and I was fucking done.

I burst through her door to the hot, sunny day – not a cloud in sight – and raced to my car. I buckled up, leaned my head back, and focused on my breath. I grabbed an old Wendy’s bag Stella had left on the floor and put it over my face. Stella was such a car slob, I thought, as the top of my scalp tingled. I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror, and my face was white with giant red blooms on my cheeks. I inhaled the stale smell of old onions and fry grease, puffing the bag in and out until I felt less pass-out-y.

I wanted to get out of here.

I was scared. Really scared.

Grace was a fake.

I exhaled in the warm car and said it again, out loud.

“Grace was a fake, and that was a show,” I said. 

My heart pounded harder as I realized I never paid her.

I also never asked her a question.

Grace was a fake.

The shakes dwindled as I pulled out of my parking space.

I was halfway back to my apartment when I got the shakes again. Hard enough that I pulled over for a moment to reorient.

I never paid Grace.

I also never told Grace my name.