2022-02-13 - 5:31 p.m.
After I had succumbed to my crippling back injury in the summer of 2016, I ceased to see any light at the end of the tunnel. Not implying that I had ever had a rose-tinted glasses view of the future, but at that point I could no longer see anything. My life had essentially ended. I was paralyzed from the waist down with the advantage of crippling pain. I couldn’t move lest it was met with screaming agony, and I had the misfortune of having to relieve myself in various containers as I couldn’t get out of the bed. Everything was Stygian. I was trapped in one room, every friend had vanished, and I was forced to rethink my future.
As the months passed the pain slowly subsided and I taught myself how to walk again. Still, I was fully aware that things would never be the same. I couldn’t stand long enough to complete any task and if I were to sit down that length of time became shorter. I had to lay down most of the day in a seal like position to relieve the stress of the lower half of my body. I would no longer be able to perform the only occupations I had ever held, manual labor. Even though I could walk I was a worthless cripple, constantly mocked by a right leg that looked stunningly meaty and a left one that resembled a baseball bat with skin pulled over it.
I wanted to die. As I lay in my bed day after day the only fantasy I could fathom was making my way to the nearest overpass and doing a swan dive onto oncoming speeding traffic.
By the following year, two weeks before the anniversary, I was finally mobile enough to putter about, drive a car, and briefly visit people. I made sure to not overexert myself and kept my operations minimal as to not tear my healing discs. It was right about this time that I began hearing the voices, the ones telling me I needed to procure myself a deck of tarot cards. It seemed out of place and not in my character, but every time there was a moment of silence this yearning to have a deck of these cards crept in.
I had many friends who either dabbled in the occult or proclaimed themselves to be witches, so I was familiar with the concepts, but it was never anything that remotely interested me. Quite honestly, I had no respect for divination. I thought the whole field to be a sea of con artists and charlatans grifting rubes with cold reads. I thought them to be on the level of spiritualists doing parlor tricks stealing money from the lost and disenchanted. Every act of fortune telling disgusted me and yet here I was feeling the urge to peak behind the veil. I had no idea where these desires were coming from, but I was compelled, forced by an invisible hand almost, to acquire one of these decks and learn their way.
Due the company I kept I was well familiar with every magic shop in a sixty-mile radius. My friends would always drag me along to these places to pick up various trinkets and books while I would suppress my laughter to the contents within. All of these stores seemed like jokes to me except for this one that even they were nervous about stepping inside. I had only been in this particular shop twice before but both times I felt uneasy. It carried a lot of what you would refer to as witchcraft paraphernalia. There was a curtain blocking off a room you couldn’t enter and from behind it you could hear what sounded like the hybrid of a sickly parrot and a crying infant. The place was bleak and unsettling. It smelled invasive, there were ceremonial daggers everywhere, and it was flooded with satanic imagery. The people inside mulled around like the dead and looked about the same. For some uncontrollable reason though I knew this was the place I needed to go to.
I sat in the parking lot of the store for a solid twenty minutes, chain-smoking trying to gird the courage to walk through the doors. When I eventually built up the fortitude to enter, I noticed that it looked different then I had remembered. Gone was the rumpus room of Anton LaVey and what sat in its place resembled the home of a good witch from some fairy tale. The proprietor was an elderly matronly looking woman and the costumers appeared to be your average teenage hippie girls. As I stood wondering if I had come to the wrong shop the older woman approached me and politely asked if there was anything she could help me with. In a low library-esque tone I said, “This is going to sound completely insane, but something is telling me it’s in my best interest to obtain a deck of Tarot cards.”
She simply smiled and replied, “That doesn’t sound peculiar in the slightest. I have a table over there with all of my decks. Why don’t you look around and pick the one that calls to you.”
I circled the table being conscious not to touch anything until one deck caught my eye. Grabbed my immediate attention would be a better expression. I lunged for it and pulled it closer to see every detail on the packaging. What spoke to me the most were the illustrations on the front and back of the box. It looked as though it were drawn by the favorite comic book artist of my childhood, Jon Bolton. He had a photo realism style that I adored. Even more curious was that unlike all of the other decks, the people depicted on the cards appeared to be old Hollywood film stars of the thirties and forties. I was hypnotized. Without hesitation I raced to the counter and told the woman, “This is the one.”
She flashed an approving smile and said, “Oh, you found the good one. I’m rather fond of this deck myself, and lucky for you it’s the last one.”
At the register as I was fumbling for my wallet a thought had occurred to me, I had no clue how any of this worked. I mentioned to the woman that this was the first deck I had ever owned and that in my haste and elation I had forgotten to pick up an owner’s manual of sorts. I saw there were several shelves filled with books about Tarot reading and asked her which one I should get to accompany my purchase. With a sly sheepish grin she answered, ‘Oh I think you’ll do well enough on your own. You strike me as someone that will be a natural at this.”
Offput, I then pointed to a bulletin board behind her and remarked about how I see that she teaches classes in readings and that maybe I should register for one of those. Once again though it was the same variation of the retort about how I needn’t trouble myself with that sort of thing and that I’ll figure it out myself.
I swelled with a bit of pride marveling that I struck her as potentially gifted person and thanked her and proceeded to drive home. I was only about a mile away from the store when something odd struck me. A shopkeeper had just refused money from me. I willingly offered her roughly two hundred dollars in books and classes and she turned it down. In any store I had ever been in the salesperson always tried to add on myriad accoutrements to siphon more cash out of me and this woman flat out rejected the idea. At first, I was puzzled which spiraled into a confusion which then ended in fear. What had started as a concept now began to feel very real. A seriousness began to settle in.
At home I lounged in my bed for hours mesmerized as I studied the images on each card in the Norbert Losche’s Cosmic Tarot deck. It was more magnificent than I had even hoped for. I felt connected to the illustrated masterpiece that collated my love of 80’s comic books and the golden age of Hollywood. Rapidly an obsession was beginning to pull me in. I needed to master this art, learn all of its secrets, and graduate to the status of medium. The next obstacle for me was to gather every piece of knowledge on the subject and compile it all into my own personal brand of chaos magic. I found an empty sketchbook in a box at the top of the stairs and began to fill it with the morsels I was going to collect.
The quest embarked on the internet and sailed to public library. I found that the major arcana, the twenty-two trump cards, were originally pages from a book dating back to the time of the Kabala that told a story. Each one not only represented a position on the tree of life but served as a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Not only could these cards indirectly spell out words, but every ideogram constituted a word which when assembled could also spell out messages. Even though documented in the tome I was transcribing, I also started drawing on the cards themselves and affixing the proper positions to each one. It turns out the British had altered them, and I needed the true root of their Eastern origins. Each page of my book, front and back, was dedicated to an individual card from both major and minor arcana and was filled with every scenario the card could possibly depict. The last half reserved for any type of reading spreads.
My intention was to give my clients the most meticulous reading possible and to never be construed as a mountebank. I planned on charging them ten dollars and I wished to be thorough and leave them with a feeling that they weren’t being hustled. This was of great importance to me. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing I had manipulated the spirit world for personal gain. So, I committed myself to demanding proficiency in all aspects of the craft.
I continued to write and distance myself from the outside entrapments. Every second was spent scribing, I rarely slept, and after two weeks my book was completed.
That duration of time coalesced in a blur of mystic energy. My mind ran through time as I consumed a whirlwind of information of forgone legend and mythology. I studied the teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, basked in the sacred geometry of the Golden triangle. I dreamt of Sir Francis Bacon secretly interacting with Freemasons and Rosicrucians, then faking his death to become Saint Germaine to compose the works of Shakespeare. I was helixing into madness yet felt completely sane.
For my next trick I was going to start reading my own cards but was so tired after the completion of my opus I first had to sleep. I closed my eyes as I sank into my pillow but was awoken by screaming. Alone in my room in the silence of the woods, piercing wailing would not let me rest. I closed my eyes tighter but the howls only became louder. I assumed it was in my head but when I stood up to inspect the corners, I could still hear it. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and in the morning stumbled about like a zombie. I had no energy to read anything and merely collapsed on the sofa staring at a marathon of the most wretched reality television.
By 11:45 pm when the air was cooler, and the sun had vanished, I had finally gained enough strength to go out for a pack of cigarettes. The night revived me as I floated the Rav4 to the gas station. When I stopped at the intersect of the lonely country road my car radio turned itself on. The original 1957 version of “Dedicated to the One I Love” by the 5 Royals started playing right from the beginning, and then the radio turned itself off directly after the line, “But the darkest hour is just before day.”
I never got that pack of Menthols. I sat at that intersect the whole time the song played, then turned around and went back home. I laid in my bed staring at the ceiling and the screaming started once more. I looked to the nightstand at the head of my bead and saw the stack of cards resting on top of my book with the ink still drying inside. I had found the source of the anguished cries.
I grabbed them, and threw them across the room hitting the wall as they drifted like falling leaves to the floor. All I could hear now was my heavy breathing then all went black.
When I woke up the following day the cards and book had returned to their location that I had tossed them from, neatly stacked. There was no question, I needed to destroy this monster I had created. I ran to the burning barrel in my back yard and heaved them in. I squirted a quarter of the contents of the bottle of my lighter fluid and flicked a match. They wouldn’t ignite. I reached in the barrel to pick up the Fool card and held my Zippo to it, but nothing happened. I then proceed to tear the cards and pages from the book into as many shreds as possible and doused them with even more lighter fluid but for some reason I couldn’t attain a solitary spark. I gathered up armfuls of newspaper and cardboard, stuffed them atop of the barrel filling it to the top, emptied the entire bottle of lighter fluid, and flung in another match. This time the flames erupted like a volcano.
I sat on my porch watching it burn, staring at the blue and purple flames pluming with black smoke. I couldn’t go near the barrel though to see if the cards remained. I never went near the barrel again for that matter. I let the weeds and brush grow around and engulf it and forgot it was even back there a year later when I moved out of that house.
I never heard the screaming again. I slept well after that endeavor and a few days after the incident was completely erased from my mind. I spent one final year in that home and didn’t see the rusted out burning barrel until the day new owners were moving in. I was retrieving a few things I had left in the garage, and I saw the new tenants dumping the ash from the barrel along the tree line in the back yard. They looked to me and said, “This stuff makes good mulch.”
I silently nodded and got in my vehicle and left.
I’m not sure what happed to those people after that because every couple of months when I happened to drive past the place it was vacant. If they had moved in, they were gone shortly after.
I hadn’t though about any of this for over three years until about a week ago when I was watching an old Film Noir on cable and someone at a carnival was reading the tarot. Since then, I can’t get it out of my head. I’m dwelling on it, wondering what would have happened if I had soldiered through. I never did one reading, not even on myself. I wrote a book that never saw the light of dawn, I never pulled back the curtain to see what was behind it, I don’t even know if I was even capable of prophesizing the future. All I can hear currently is radio static and a soulful black voice telling me, “The darkest hour, is just before day.”
