Don’t ever play cards with a sorcerer

We approached the pond through tufts of long grass which bent over before us, heavy with dew. It was so peaceful there, I could hear each muffled rustle as we stepped. Except for the narrow clearing before us, ferns and bushes encroached on the water from all sides. They sprouted from the banks and reached with leafy arms over the surface, which rested motionless like glass. Wisps of fog moved lazily like smoke from a campfire, while the evergreen forest stretched away in every direction.

We had driven out of the city and through the night and the day and another night. I remembered staring out the window, half awake and half asleep, as we passed mile after mile of lighted gas stations and dark farms and fields.

I was asleep when we finally stopped. Mr. Étranger woke me. The light was dim and the air cool. It was just before dawn. He was still wearing his smoky gray coat. He needed it now. It was cooler where we were. I sat up in the back of the car and looked for the others, but they were gone. I looked for the dagger. It was gone, too. And then I remembered, at some point he’d asked me if he could have it and I said yes. He took it away and I watched it disappear.

We parked on open dirt at the rear of an A-frame cabin. Behind the car, a dirt road wound around a hill and disappeared into the fog. All around us the tips of the evergreens poked through the earth-bound clouds. It was beautiful.

The distant echo of a calling bird broke the still air.

“Where is this place?”

He pointed to the far side of the cabin and began to walk in silence. He led me around the house, past a rick of wood and down a shallow slope. And there was the pond. It was as clear as an alpine lake and perfectly still. I could see the rocky bottom, no more than a few feet deep across most of its expanse. The still reflections of the trees hung on the surface like ghosts. Some twenty meters away, the distant bank was barely visible through the fog. To my right was a rocky outcropping. Directly below it, halfway to the middle of the water, there was a hole in the pond’s stony floor — a submerged cave maybe two meters by five. It opened like a throat and disappeared at an angle as it narrowed. The sides were lined in bright green moss. I think it was the source — a spring or maybe an underground river.

He stopped me at the edge. “Do not disturb the water,” he warned in a whisper.

He motioned for me to kneel, and I did, and we stayed like that a long time. I didn’t mind — even though it was chilly and the dew soaked through my jeans and got my butt all wet. Every moment there was a break from everything that was wrong with the world.

“I thought they had all gone,” he said in the slightest whisper.

“Who?” I asked in an equally slight voice.

He was watching the water. I was watching his face. It was a nice face, not especially handsome or beautiful — in fact, he had a bit of an odd-shaped head — but that’s what made it comforting. It was real.

“The worshipers of the one god called them monsters,” he explained softly, “and drove them from the dells and valleys. The philosophers called them curious and payed hunters to take their heads and fingers so they could be displayed in cabinets of wonder. The men of business clear-cut their homes, dammed their rivers, polluted their lakes. The Masters shut and locked every door to their realm they could find.”

He paused, as if listening for a silent approach.

“Our adversaries have their Nameless gods, great tentacled beasts that whisper to them through the flames. Once upon a time, we too had allies. The Others. The child-race. Woodfolk.”

He was quiet a long time. I heard the bird call again in the distance.

“I thought they had abandoned us.” He took a long breath and let it out with a single nod. “But it would appear I was wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s no accident the dagger found refuge on holy ground.”

He meant that the bank was a converted church. That’s why they couldn’t find it — with their spells or whatever.

He stood. I did the same, but he motioned for me to stay.

“What am I supposed to do?” I whispered.

“Wait until I am gone,” he said. “Wait until you can neither see nor hear me. Wait for the silence to return. Then, ask for forgiveness. Ask for help.”

He walked back toward the cabin and I sat back on the dewy grass. I could feel the moisture seep down my pant legs and into my socks. I was getting soaked in the dew of that place. But I didn’t care. It was so peaceful. And beautiful. I could see why native people worshiped at places like that, and believed their gods lived within.

A curse was on me. Ancient and powerful. It would destroy everything I loved. It would make sure I was witness to it all. And then it would destroy me.

“I know I don’t deserve it,” I said softly. “Forgiveness.” I ran my hands through the tufts of grass as if through the hair of a lover. “I had so many opportunities to make things different.”

I should never have left. At least, not the way I did. I should’ve asked the school for delayed entry. I should’ve tried.

“How can I ask for what I don’t deserve?” I asked the trees.

There was a soft splash on the water. My eyes shot to it, but I couldn’t see anything. The central depth of the pond was obscured by concentric waves that rolled slowly outward in all directions, like a clear note strummed from the string of a harp. I saw an upturned leaf. It was as green as the moss in the pond, curled at the edges, and fluted at the tip, like a pitcher. It floated from the center, bobbing on the surface as it was carried by the undulating water.

Right toward me.

As the tiny waves subsided, it stopped bobbing and turned back and forth on an invisible current. As it approached, I saw it carried something at its center: a single bead of water, glowing like ice in a winter’s dawn.

The leaf hit the grassy lip of the pond, bounced, and spun, and I lifted it. I looked around, as if asking permission, but I saw nothing. The disturbance on the surface had reached all corners of the pond and been reflected back, and the ripples danced over each other and about.

I looked at the leaf. I looked at its shiny cargo. I tilted my head and let it fall on my tongue. It was cool and sweet, and I closed my eyes and felt it run down my throat.

I laid on the wet grass clutching the leaf in my hand. I stayed like that for a long time.

By the time I heard him approach, the fog had lifted and the sun was halfway to its peak. Birds chirped.

“It won’t stop anything,” he said from some twenty feet back. “But with luck, the magic of this place will hold the curse at bay. Or slow it for a time.”

I sat up.

He started toward me, hand outstretched. “I smashed your phone.”

I took it. “Yup,” I sighed. “You did.”

I felt the bent casing and ran a finger over the shattered screen. A piece of it came off in my hand. He’d done a very thorough job.

“If the curse cannot easily bring its tortures to you,” he said, “it will have to work harder. And that may also buy us time.”

He showed me his phone. He’d smashed that as well.

“Where are we?” I asked.

Judging from the temperature, I guessed mountains. I wanted it to be very, very far from everything where no random stranger would ever wander.

“It’s better if you don’t know.”

I nodded. I stood and looked at the pond. The disturbance had long since abated and I could once again see the cave that opened in the shadow of the rocky outcropping.

“What’s in there?”

“Not what,” he said. “Who.”

He bowed deeply to the water and with great respect. I did the same.

“I suspect she comes and goes these days, following the course of the underground river to and from the faraway lands. I suspect she checks in on us, from time to time.”

“She?” I looked to the moss-covered cave again.

“The lady of this place,” he said. “Come. We have bothered her enough.”

The cabin had well water and no electricity. I asked if they could find me there, like they had before, but Etude said no. He said it was a holy place, before Columbus even, and their spells wouldn’t be able to penetrate it. But just to be sure, he took one of the side mirror off the car and broke it. Then he put one piece each over the cabin’s doors, facing out, and over all of the windows, too.

The interior smelled of earth and campfire. There was a stag’s head hanging from the railing of the loft that opened to the main room — big antlers and everything. But it wasn’t scary. It was like it was looking after us. There wasn’t TV or internet or phone service or anything. It was a big deal just to get a newspaper. There wasn’t much to do, so I took hikes. Étranger said it was safe as long as I kept by the little lake. I was sure to follow his instructions. To the letter.

There were water birds nesting, including a pair of cranes, a male and female. I spent hours watching them: from the bank, from the porch, through the front windows of the cabin. He was so attentive. He brought her fish and cleaned her feathers. Etude was around — he never left — but he was busy with preparations. I sensed he needed to concentrate so I tried not to bother him. But we played board games some nights. Mr. Dench was there most of the time as well. My silent guardian, usually patrolling the woods. But he’s not much for conversation. Turns out he doesn’t have a heart. Go figure.

“Why me?” I said.

We were sitting at the little table, just the chef and I, while the crickets chirped outside and the fire crackled under the hearth.

“Is it very selfish of me to ask?”

He was staring intently at the playing cards in his hand. “Our ancestors noticed how the whole world, from the animals to the heavenly bodies, were split into opposing principles, pairs of opposites: day and night, water and land, male and female, sun and moon.” He shifted a couple cards from one side of his hand to the other. “Even modern physics suggests that is the very nature of the universe, that creation itself is carpeted in particles — spontaneous matter-antimatter pairs — that merge and separate, separate and merge in a continuous froth, and that if you combined everything with its opposite, you would reduce the universe to one. The cosmic equation.”

He stopped, like that explained everything. “Go fish,” he said.

I scowled. I had like ten times more cards than he did.

“You’re cheating somehow. With magic. I just haven’t figured out how yet.”

Believe it or not, I managed to make it through everything with the tarot deck intact, and given that it was just about the only diversion we had at the cabin — outside of a combo chess/checkers board and the board game Life, which was missing some pieces. Etude said in Europe, that’s mostly how the deck was used, for play rather than divination, which is one of those things I think I knew but never really thought about. It makes you realize just how much the material doesn’t matter, just like how learning another language teaches you that the magic isn’t in the words, and doing art teaches you the magic isn’t in the paint. It’s in the act.

He taught me a bunch of new games. I sucked at all of them.

“I do not cheat,” he insisted.

“Yeah. You don’t brood either.”

I drew a card. Seven of Wands.

“Do you have any sevens?” he asked.

I groaned and handed him the one I just drew. He placed a book of four sevens on the table.

“You are so cheating!”

“You never answered my question,” he said as he readjusted the last cards in his hand.

“Huh?”

“Why a phoenix?”

I lifted my shirt and looked at my tattoo. Honestly I think I just wanted to make sure it was still there, that it hadn’t come to life at some point, as Fish suggested, and flown away. Nothing would have surprised me anymore.

“Because nothing can keep her down,” I said. “No matter what happens, she springs eternal. Like hope.”

He nodded toward my cards. “Your turn.”

“Do you have any fives?”

He shook his head. I sighed and drew another card. The Ace of Wands. I handed it to him before he even asked and he took it without looking.

Don’t ever play cards with a sorcerer.

Like, ever.

I set my cards face down on the table and sat back. “So, wait. You’re saying I’m like a free radical or something. Is that it?”

“Unbounded feminine energy,” he corrected.

I thought for a moment. “Someone told me my soul sparks.”

“It is an odd way to put it.” He set his cards down, too.

“Have you ever been in love?” I asked. “I mean, like, really in love? Not just lust or infatuation, but the scary kind of love, where it feels like if you give into it, you’ll lose yourself completely? I mean, everybody acts like ‘true love’ is this amazingly awesome thing, but I really don’t think any of them have ever actually experienced it. They want the movie version, where it’s all puppies and laugh tracks and there’s no terror or doubt.”

I stopped finally. He was silent a moment and wouldn’t look at me and I thought I’d committed some horrible breach of magical etiquette or something by babbling on in defense of myself. When he finally spoke, his voice was very soft.

“From birth, I was trained to be the shaman of my village. The conclusion of that training began on my thirteenth birthday, when I was blindfolded and abandoned deep in the jungle, there to remain until I returned a man. Or not at all. The purpose was to discover — to know — the great source of life in whose service I would spend the rest of my days. As healer of my people. We called her Ixhua’ti. You might call her Gaia. Or Mother Nature.”

“You saw her?”

Etude looked down at his open, tattooed palms.

“I see her every day. As do you.” He held up his hands again. “She gave me these.”

I stared at the intricate designs. Like Nazca lines meet Egyptian hieroglyphs.

“Wait.” The reality of his words hit me and I closed my eyes. “You’re telling me that you fell in love with the earth?”

They way he talked, with the past tense and everything, I got the sense they weren’t seeing each other anymore, the sorcerer and the earth-mother, and that made me sad. If someone like him couldn’t make it work, how could any of the rest of us?

But then, those days, everything made me sad. I thought about Kell all the time. Almost every minute, if I let myself. I wasn’t going to let her death be for nothing. I wasn’t going to let them have the dagger. I wasn’t going to be a victim. I wasn’t going to put everyone I loved in danger. My new friends. My mom and dad. The Suleimans. The world.

So.

I have to die.

It’s the only way.

Really, really, really, really, really really sucks though.

He told me the plan one night and I just sat at the table in silence. Here I’d said nothing would surprise me anymore.

I was wrong.

When he finished, he waited for probably twenty minutes while I just sat there, staring at nothing.

“Are you serious?” I asked him. “Like, no joke? Not symbolism or metaphor or whatever? Like, really really?”

“Of course,” he said, as if the implication was insulting.

“But.” I shook my head. “I mean. How?”

He nodded to my side. “Because you are the phoenix.”

So, okay. This is how it works. I have to swallow something called the jewel of many colors, the big cut gem that his hostess, Milan, wears around her neck. It’s like the size of a walnut! Etude said it refracts the light of what can’t be seen, so he’ll be able to find me in the dark of the underworld. Then he has to perform some kind of ritual — at the end of which he stabs me in the heart.

Zoinks.

After I’m dead, he’ll drain every last drop of blood from my body and burn it away. With that, the curse will definitely be broken.

“Why blood?” I asked.

“Hebrews 9:22,” he said. “Everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.”

He’ll cremate my body and bury the ashes in the place of my birth, sort of the reverse of how vampires have to lay in the soil in which they were buried. But that means they’ll have to take me to Hong Kong and sneak onto the hospital grounds somehow — him and Dench and Milan. Not that I’m worried. I get the sense they’ve done this kind of thing before. Lots of times.

Next the mixture has to sit for three days. Étranger says Jesus wasn’t wrong there. Then my new friend will don his mask and the bright feathered garb and take his drum and descend to the underworld, like the shamans of old. To do battle with Death, I guess.

Man, I wish I could see that.

Shit.

Maybe I will.

Anyway, while he’s down there, our friends up here will exhume the soil containing my ashes and seal it in a large urn, which represents the womb. The urn will be baked the moment my soul returns. He showed me a big old book with a bunch of pictures, like the pages I saw in Lyman’s office.

“It recapitulates the vital heat of creation,” he said.

But this is the most dangerous part because the seal can’t be broken. If any part of it is cracked for whatever reason, the “humours” escape, and I’m lost for good.

He keeps telling me not to worry. Like that helps.

After that, their part is done, and that’s where it gets tricky. The urn has to be incubated. Etude said that just means watched, looked after, for a full cycle of the Moon — its death and rebirth, one turn of a woman’s womb, the life-creator. The kicker is, it can’t just be anybody sitting there. Even someone who loves me, like Mom and Dad. To pull me back, it has to be the other half of my spontaneous pair. The Sun to my Moon. The sky to my earth. The yang to my yin. The guy I’ve known since forever. The one with the very same birthday. The first one I kissed. The only one I ever really loved.

So.

Yeah.

I have no idea what he’s going to do when he hears about all this. But if he doesn’t totally flip, if he figures what the hell and he sits patiently by the urn and reads to me, or catches me up on all the silly pop music he likes, I’ll have a totally new body. Etude says most of my memories will be there but it might be spotty. He also said he’s not sure if the tattoo will come through. That’ll be new for him. We bet fifty bucks. I said it will because it’s part of me. I’m totally gonna win too, because karma. We played so many games at the cabin and he never let me win. Not even once!

So . . . that’s it, I guess. They’re kinda waiting on me now. Little bit nervous. Never died before. It’s so crazy not knowing what’s going to happen in, like, an hour.

But then, we never really do, do we? We just think we do, until something happens to wake us from the illusion. Etude says that’s where Life is lived — with a capital letter. Not respiration and metabolism. Not work and school and laundry and groceries. Not the long sleep of existence but where it shatters, those few brief flashes where we’re awake to our own consciousness. That’s where the angels live. I think that’s where he lives more often than not.

But not me. I’m just a dumb human and I’m terrified. But I guess we’ll see.

I guess we’ll see.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

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The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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