It Will Just Be Us, page 8
“I want you to think about what’s been bothering you,” she says as wind berates the shuttered window. “The first card represents your present position.” She flips it over.
The moon gazes somnolently down at a dog, a wolf, and a lobster between two towers.
“The Moon,” she says, “is a card of intuition, alienation, and the unconscious. There are two sides to this card: on one side insight and clarity, and on the other confusion and anxiety. I suspect you’re somewhere in the middle, searching for answers.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Hush. The next card represents your present desires.” The card that appears displays six golden cups of white flowers and two children before a medieval castle, all bathed in a happy yellow glow. Agnes smiles. “The Six of Cups. Nostalgia, memories. You have a desire to return to happy times from the past.”
Unfortunately, I lack my mother’s rose-colored glasses. What the house shows me often destroys even my tempered memories with the harsh light of truth, of how things really occurred. I’m not sure I can believe this card’s assumption of the endless supply of happiness that the past delivers. The past is no different from the present, as dark or as light.
Is it my desire that the past be granted that happy glow? Or that my experience of the past be like everyone else’s—that softly filtered recollection afforded by memory, and memory’s ability to alter perception, to smooth out the rough spots? Do I wish, perhaps, that I did not have to live with actual recreations of the past wandering through the house, ruining the perfect nostalgia that comes with no longer having to experience it firsthand?
In any case, I wish it were a seven instead of a six. Seven is a much better number, round and whole. Six is too symmetrical.
“The next card represents the unexpected.” She flips the card and frowns. Landing upside down, it depicts a man on a gray throne in the middle of a crashing sea. “Typically the King of Cups represents balance and control.” She taps the card with her finger. “But when it’s reversed like this, you see, it embodies emotional manipulation and volatility. While many of the cards relate to your inner life, the Court cards usually indicate someone else’s involvement—in this case, a man in a position of power, most likely.”
“Not my division chair, I hope. He is a royal prick, although you can’t argue that he isn’t as predictable as a cup of coffee.”
She shakes her head. “No, I feel it must be either the appearance of someone you haven’t met yet, or someone you haven’t thought about in a long while. Watch out for someone who seems calm on the outside. He is not what he appears to be.”
Her expression has become one of unhappy contemplation, and the candle flickers and fills me with its heady, cloying scent.
“Don’t worry. I’m not in the habit of entertaining wild men.”
She gives her head a little shake and smiles. “You know I wouldn’t mind it if you did entertain a man, for a change. He doesn’t have to be wild.”
“Wouldn’t that take all the fun out of it?”
“I’m only saying, if your goal is to become an old maid, then you’re on the right track.”
“Mother.”
“What?”
Seemingly, she will not flip the next card until I have provided her some satisfactory reply. “It isn’t as if the relationships in this family have worked out very well, is it?”
“Well,” she hedges, “we don’t know for certain whether things with Donovan are really over. Though to be perfectly honest with you, I was never terribly fond of him.” She leans in close, conspiratorially. “Don’t tell your sister I said that.”
As much as it pleases me to share secrets with my mother, I think to myself that Elizabeth would, in fact, be thrilled to hear it. She would feast on the knowledge of our mother’s disapproval, which would likely drive her right back into Don’s arms. It would be just like her to do that.
To be honest, I could never tell whether I like Don or not. I can recall times when he has been something akin to a friend, the kind you might casually share a beer with—but I can think, too, of times when his easy mood soured all of a sudden and he turned his vicious sights on the nearest available target. He is the kind of man you might tiptoe around, enjoying his presence when he is in a good mood but always wondering, in the back of your mind, if the wrong word will ruin it. The world is full of these men, having told them long ago that they are entitled to the sea and the stars and all manner of life beneath.
Still, in some ways I know I am indebted to him, as uncomfortable as that makes me. I did almost take out his eye.
My mother flips the next card. “This one represents the immediate future.”
The words are hardly out of her mouth when she nearly sucks them back in: riding across the tarot card on a white red-eyed horse is a skeleton clad in a suit of armor, who goes by the name of Death.
“Now, before you get upset,” she says in a rush, “the Death card is the most misunderstood of all the cards. It doesn’t necessarily signify physical death, but other kinds of profound change, the kind of change that destroys what came before.”
The words do nothing to mitigate the unease in her voice.
Behind the skeleton holding his flag of death, the sun sets between two towers, above which a gray purgatorial sky presides over the corpses that lie in the horse’s path. “These are the towers from the Moon card,” she says. “That means there’s a connection between your current confusion and the change that’s coming.”
A stark thread of lightning illuminates the window like the crackling bony hand of Death reaching toward us through the curtains, followed almost instantaneously by thunder that I can feel reverberate in my chest. I am afraid now to look again at the skeletal rider, fearing that this time he won’t have a face.
“We left the wine in the kitchen,” says my mother, apropos of nothing. She goes to sweep up the cards in her hands, but I grab her wrist.
“We aren’t finished.”
She shakes her head. “I’m getting a very negative feeling. I think the electricity in the air is throwing off the energy. This was a bad time. We ought to try again another time.”
“Just finish it. I have to know.”
“What is it you’re hoping to see?”
My hands are itching for a good-luck charm; I nervously bite my thumbnail, tear off a pearly crescent, and put it in my pocket. Mother is watching me, expectant. Can I tell her without spoiling it all?
“What if I told you I’ve seen the future?”
She picks up the deck, contemplating. “I would say you’ve finally opened yourself up spiritually. That you’re finally understanding this place.”
Her words send a bolt through my heart. I force myself not to chew on my other nails. “I’m not talking about telling someone’s fortune. I’m talking about … literally seeing the future. It’s not possible, though. It must be something else. Someone else.” I laugh without humor. “That, or I’m losing my mind.”
My mother only nods. “You aren’t losing your mind, Sam. The future, in this house … I admit, it’s rare. It only solidifies as time progresses. But once a certain choice is made or a certain event takes place, then the future decides itself. And just as memories of the past drift through these halls, so too does the future, in glimpses and shadows.” She fixes me with her gaze. “But it is there. The future is all around us, just as much as the past. If you’ve seen something that hasn’t yet come to pass …” She shrugs.
My stomach has twisted itself into a knot like one of Elizabeth’s old guitar strings. If my mother is right, then that means my faceless boy is who I think he is after all.
I could hide from this, pretend I’d never seen him, but that would be cowardly. I cannot turn my back on the truth. Better to stare the future in the face, then, even if the future has no face. Better to face it myself and spare my mother the heartache.
“Flip the last card.”
My mother seems reluctant to continue, now that we’ve gone down this rabbit hole. “I’m telling you, Sam, we really oughtn’t take this reading to heart. The air … the storm …” She trails off with a sigh when she sees I’m not going to budge. “The last card is the outcome.”
A woman sits up in bed, hands over her face, nine swords perched horizontally on the wall behind her head.
Lightning, again, and this time the thunder so close it occurs simultaneously, right on top of us, a great clash of angry gods, and we are plunged into gripping darkness, blind, with the wind and the rain pounding to be let in.
Fuzzy candlelight imbues Agnes with the ethereal look of a ghost. Somehow everything feels closer in the darkness; even with the rain, the room is quieter.
“You ought to check the fuse box,” she says in a hush.
I don’t want to get up and wander into that abyss. Unseen things creep in shadow behind me. “What does the card mean?”
“The Nine of Swords,” she says. “Have you ever had the sensation of waking from a bad dream … only to discover you’re living a nightmare?”
There is nothing in the darkness behind me. I know there isn’t. But it feels like there is, like there is someone, or something, back there with eyes burning into my prickling neck—or perhaps Xs where eyes should be—and with it comes the surety that if I turn around, I will see whatever it is. Oh don’t turn around, don’t turn around and see it, if you don’t turn around maybe it will turn out there is nothing there after all.
What you have seen is real, is what the card tells me. Julian is real, it is all real—not a dream, not a nightmare, but reality, if there is any difference indeed between them. You have seen what Julian will become. I see the cards now like a kind of code, revealing their secrets, looking into the layers of reality to show me the truth.
The rest of her explanation haunts me, though:
“The Nine of Swords symbolizes all of your fears, your regrets, your inner anguish. Your knowledge that whatever has gone wrong in your life—it is, in some respects, your own fault.”
Candlelight shivers over her face looming in the darkness. I feel spooked by the look on her face, by the cards on the table making an arc of dread, by the dark that encloses us.
“There are more candles around here somewhere. Some in the dining room. And the basement, I believe.” She begins packing up the cards. Beads of melted wax drip down the candle between us.
Must I? I suppose I must. I will not send my mother blundering about in the dark, much less Elizabeth. It will have to be me.
My skin is alive with dread as I make my way downstairs, feeling my way through the shadowed house, over the groaning floor, to the dining room where I search in vain. No candles here. I turn, dreading the blind trip into the basement, but my path is blocked by a figure.
“Elizabeth?” I whisper, even though I know it isn’t her.
I can hear the figure breathing in the dark. He is wet, muddy; stinks of swamp rot, buzzes with flies. My breath catches.
“Julian?”
The figure doesn’t move. For a moment, he doesn’t breathe. Then he says, “Sometimes I feel so cold and so still, like I’m really dead. I think if I just go still enough, I’ll be dead.”
Lightning flashes in through the window, lighting up the faceless boy—fourteen or fifteen, now—and I see red caked into the swamp water soaking him. Gore crusted under his nails. Strands of hair in his fingers. My gorge rises. Darkness returns, and he speaks out of it.
“I thought we could be dead together, but I don’t like the way she stares. I put her in the basement,” he says. “With the others.”
Gagging, I reel away as another crash of thunder shakes the house and blares its lightning into the room, making every corner livid, showing me the muddy footprints on the floor and a streak of red, something dragged. I don’t know where he went, but I cannot see him anymore.
We are not evil, I tell myself. The Wakefields are not cursed with madness and murder. Some of us are good. Some of us have to be good.
I find myself in front of the ancient cellar whose door swings inward on aching hinges and opens up to an abyss. What will I find here? Candles, or the others that Julian put in the basement? I gaze like one gone blind and feel myself unable to step into the nothingness that lies beyond the doorway, where an ancient staircase will lead me down into the depths.
A damp, rotten smell emerges from that darkness, as if the swamp is eating away at the house from underneath; I force myself to take one step down, and another, but still I can see nothing, am enveloped in the all-consuming perfume of decay.
Isn’t it strange how familiar spaces become unfamiliar when one loses a sense? I have been in that basement a thousand times, collecting gardening tools, jars, and other sundries; and, knowing where the candles must be, I assume I will be able to find my way to the far shelf in the dark; but now I feel lost—as though the basement has disappeared around me, as though I may reach out for the shelf and feel something else altogether, as though once I step out into the flat expanse I will never be able to find my way back to the stairs again.
Which may be a reasonable fear, after all, as there are several doors in the cellar. Any one of which, if left open, might lead me down one of the strange secret passageways that tunnel below the house, most of them flooded for all time thanks to the swamp, left to rot half-steeped in muck. The tunnels were originally used as part of an elaborate system of hiding escaped slaves, but I can hardly imagine a person wanting to creep down one of those low, narrow, black passageways, wondering where it may lead, if there even is an exit, or if it will only lead them endlessly into the entrails of the damp forbidding earth.
Here at the bottom of the stairs, the smell is stronger, and when I take that last step to the floor, I understand why. Unexpectedly, cold water sloshes over my ankles, shocking me, and I am back up the stairs panting before I recognize the simple fact that the basement has flooded in the storm, as it so often does.
In the hall closet I find rain boots, and in the kitchen, rummaging blindly through the drawers, I come upon a flashlight. All is eerily quiet in the house, as if the darkness has turned off all sound but for the creaking of floorboards under my feet, and I switch on the flashlight to guide me back down and assess the damage.
I feel the cards following after me as I go, like bad omens. I see the Moon in the ethereal circle of the flashlight’s beam against the stairs as I descend again into the black ocean the basement has become. And in the middle of that ocean, perhaps, there is an ancient faceless man sitting on a throne, the swampy waves crashing around him—the King of Cups, brooding over his cruel domain.
I shine the flashlight over the opaque water. As I slosh through it, I decide it must be at least three inches deep, but I feel with every step I take that I might slip into quicksand, or a bottomless pit, and never emerge. Gratefully I find that the doors leading to the underground tunnels are all closed.
The far shelf is made of old wood that I fear may collapse in the damp, moldy air. For now it holds, and I find the candles collecting cobwebs. I ignore whatever appears to be floating in the water below; it is merely old junk that the water has swallowed up off the floor and carried along with it. It is not a body from the future. It is not a head with hair floating around it.
When I turn back for the stairs, my flashlight catches a figure standing in the middle of the room.
It is not the faceless boy but a girl, perhaps eleven years old, dark skinned and wearing a beige dress.
“It’s her,” she says, her whispery voice ripe with the silken strains of fear. “She’s coming.”
Framing her with gold light, the flashlight begins to flicker; I whack the side of it with my hand, regretting that I did not check the batteries. She wavers in and out of existence, the light shining on the terror in her eyes until it dies completely, leaving us in darkness.
I recognize this girl, and before I know it I am sloshing my way out of the basement to follow her, wondering if I will finally see the Swamp Witch—if I will find an answer to the evil that plagues this house. The same evil, perhaps, that plagues Julian.
Let me explain.
There is more to the story of Jonah, Clementine, and Meriday that I haven’t told you; pieces of the story I’ve heard secondhand from the echoes of the house, the timeline scrambled; things too strange and frightening to be real. But now that I know what I’ve seen here is real—now that I know Julian is real—anything seems possible.
I am afraid what I’m about to see when I follow the girl up through the main hall and out to the backyard won’t make a lick of sense to you unless you know the whole story leading up to that moment, so I am going to tell it as best I can, hoping you will understand this is just my own re-creation of what I have heard.
PART TWO
THE SWAMP WITCH
5
They were smuggled into the swamp under cover of night.
August led them stoically through the dark, where they crisscrossed through the brush in narrow switchbacks, up to their knees in spongy soil. The chittering of nocturnal creatures rhapsodized on the soft wind that troubled the trees above, shrugging their signature of leaves against the silvery moon. Apart from that riddle of moonlight, the only illumination afforded to them against the night was August’s yellow lantern.
Until another light shined through the trees.
Meriday saw it in the distance, bobbing as if it were on the move: an orange flame.
“Mama,” she said. “Look.”
“Hush, child,” said Clementine, urging her forward. “You just keep following Mr. August and we’ll be there soon.”
“But there’s a light,” she insisted.
Jonah and Clementine froze and looked at August with the sudden wary coldness of distrust. “Is it the camp?”
August shook his head. “We are not yet close enough.”
“Have we been followed?”
Again, August rejected the idea. They could not have been followed, and what’s more, the light was ahead of them, not behind—it was deeper in the swamp than they.
