THE UNSEEN HAND

My first thought as I neared Nocturnal Lullaby was that, if not for Catcher’s recommendation, this was the last place I’d ever have thought to come for help. I’d passed it that morning, of course, and stopped to wonder at its shadowy windows full of skulls, feathered wands, black lace capes, sequined masks, and gothic crystal balls, but even open for business, it seemed pitch dark and deserted within. Just inside the door, a full-sized skeleton reclined jauntily in its coffin, propped on one elbow like a pin-up. Around it, gargoyles of every size huddled with brooding expressions or grinned and stuck their tongues out. I’d have supposed that anyone here would need more help than they could give—yet here I was.

There seemed no one around. The walls, floor and badly peeling ceiling were all painted black. An astonishing litter of bones, authentic-looking headstones, leering monsters, melancholy plaster fountains, crystals and polished stones, jewel-encrusted poison rings, and other paraphernalia gleamed dimly in the wan light of half a dozen ten-watt ‘Edison bulbs’ and countless strands of tiny white Christmas lights. Some satirical carnie barker in my head started calling, ‘Death here! Get your death! Fresh from the morgue and still ice cold! Step right up and get your death here!’

“Can I help you?”

I whirled to find a slender, heavily powdered young woman with black lipstick and long, straight, inky hair offering me a reassuring smile from behind a counter that had been deserted seconds earlier.

“Stacy?”

“Do I know you?”

I shook my head. “Catcher sent me here. Do you know him?”

“Catcher. Yes, I do, but why…”

“I’m…new here,” I said. “I mean…to all of this, and I don’t know exactly how… He said you might help me figure out what I should—”

“Did he try telling you to go home?” she asked with a wry edge that had not been there before I’d tried to explain myself. She came around from behind her counter to stand before me in her long black velvet dress. “’Cause that’s the best help I can give you. Whatever you ran away from can’t be any worse than—”

“Yes. It was,” I cut her off.

Her expression shifted to one of mild concern. “Want to tell me about it?”

“I can’t.” I looked briefly away. “I…can’t remember…most of it.”

Her concern seemed to deepen. “What can you remember?”

Happily, Rain had given me clear instructions about this. “It’s not safe to talk about.”

“Do you remember your name?”

“Matthew,” I said.

“Matthew what?” she asked gently.

“Just Matthew.”

“Okay. …Do you remember where you’re from, Matthew?”

I weighed my options, then shook my head. “I just know…I wasn’t…safe there.”

Stacy bit her lower lip. “Honey, if you’ve got amnesia, you need to see a doctor.”

“No!” I said. “I have to hide! If I don’t hide, I’m…dead. …That’s not a joke.”

She exhaled as if I’d thumped her on the chest. “Okay, I see why Catcher sent you now, but, Matthew, I don’t think I’m equipped to give the kind of help it sounds like you need.”

“I’m not asking you to cure me of anything,” I said. “I just want to learn how to live here. Catcher said I’d never make it on the street, but I have to. For a while, at least. …Here. He said you might teach me how…to get a meal or something. Would you? Please?”

She bit her nails, then bent down to peer intently at me. “Matthew, can you be trusted? Be honest with me.”

“Trusted to what?”

She straightened with a soft chuckle, then went back behind her counter to the phone, and dialed what I hoped was not going to be some county agency, or worse yet, the police. That would be disaster, right out the gate.

“Hi, Adam,” Stacy cooed into the phone. “Is Lita there today? …Oh, good. Has she got a minute to talk with me? …No, don’t. It’s not that urgent. Just, when she gets a minute …Yes, that’d be great. In fact, would you ask if she can just come over? …Thanks so much. Bye bye.”

She hung up and smiled at me. “There’s a friend I’d like you to meet. Why don’t you just hang out here ’til she arrives, okay? Are you hungry?”

“Oh—yes, please.”

She nodded. “Wait here.”

She walked to the back of her store and disappeared through a velvet curtain there. I drifted after her, noticing a scattering of Buddhas among her gargoyles now—and some Egyptian statuary, and a lot of art and photography that seemed rather good and more ‘new age’ than evil.

“Here you are,” she said, returning through the curtain with a Tupperware container full of—God bless her—chocolate cake. “I went to a party yesterday, and could not resist bringing this back, but there’s no way I should be eating it. So please, do me a giant favor and make sure there’s nothing left, okay?” She gave me an impish smile. “Maybe we can save each other.”

“Glad to help,” I said, following her back up front.

“Come sit here.” She set the cake and a plastic fork down on an empty portion of her counter, then pulled up a stool for me behind it, beside her own.

I tried not to eat like I was desperate—but I was.

“Wow!” She watched me with raised brows. “How long since you ate?”

“This morning,” I said sheepishly, “but…it didn’t stay down.”

She grimaced. “Bet I don’t want to know where you found that meal.”

“You don’t,” I said, having learned something already about leaving people to their own conclusions. Talk of vomiting made me conscious of my smell again. She’d been kind enough to act as if she hadn’t noticed, but I scooted back from her a bit, as casually as I could. “That was amazing cake. Thank you.”

“No. Thank you,” she said, pointedly smoothing the waistline of her dress.

“So… Is it always this busy in here?” I joked, glancing around her silent, empty shop, then wondered if that had been rude.

“My clientele tend to be late risers,” she said. “It’ll be busier later this afternoon.”

“Oh… Good. …How long before your friend comes, do you think?”

“Adam said she has a break soon. Maybe twenty minutes?”

I nodded. “I’m fine if you’ve got things to do.”

“I know what we should do,” she said brightly. “I should read your cards!”

“What?”

“Tarot,” she said. “I do readings. Ever had your cards read, Matthew?”

I suddenly recalled that The Lady had been using large painted cards the first time I’d met her. I glanced nervously around Stacy’s shop, wondering what I’d stumbled into here, but saw no sign of The Tree. That didn’t stop me from wondering what the hell I’d been thinking, waltzing into a store full of gargoyles and skulls in the middle of a fairy hotspot. Way to hide, idiot! I could just imagine Rain’s face when he heard about this. “I’m not…very into magic stuff, really. …I’m not saying it’s wrong or anything. I just—”

“It’s not magic,” she assured me. “And it’s not about me meddling in your life either. It’s more a…well, a way to get a better handle on things you just didn’t know you already knew about yourself. Want to try it? Just this once?”

I shook my head. “If there’s stuff I don’t know I know, maybe I shouldn’t know it.”

“Oh, come on. It won’t hurt you any. It’s interesting—and harmless, I promise.”

Given all I was asking her to do for me, I didn’t see how I could refuse her, realizing that the clueless Andinol I was supposed to be shouldn’t even guess there might be anything to get alarmed about. Acting too afraid of this might just give me away worse. I shrugged. “Okay.”

“Oh good.” Stacy stood up and swished past me. I rose and followed her to a narrow, red-lit alcove between the shop’s display window and the far wall. She sat down at a tiny round table there, and waved me into the chair across from hers. Her little séance parlor was draped with wine-red fabric patterned in suns and moons, to which palm charts and astrological diagrams had been pinned. It seemed embarrassingly ‘hocus pocus’ after all I’d seen recently. More like Piper’s descriptions of our ridiculous ideas about them. Stacy probably wasn’t one of them at all.

“How old are you, Matthew?”

“I’m…not sure.”

Her brows climbed again. “A guess?”

I had vaguely assumed myself fourteen-ish since the change, but hadn’t realized how inconveniently young that was when I’d made the stupid wish; and since there was no clearly correct answer anyway, figured I might as well upgrade myself a little. “Fifteen, maybe?”

“Really!” She looked back down with a wry smile at the cards she was passing between her hands. “I’d never have guessed. You’re so well preserved.” She handed me the deck stacked face down. “Mix these up real good, while concentrating on whatever you’d like to find out more about.” I rearranged the cards briefly, then tried to hand them back, but she shook her head. “Keep mixing. They need time to get better acquainted with you.”

That did not sound good. I shrugged, and went on shuffling. “What should I ask about?”

“What are you concerned about right now?”

“My whole life, I guess.”

“Then ask about that, if you want. This is your reading. It’s your decision.”

When I’d shuffled for a while longer, Stacy told me to lay the cards face down in three stacks on the table. When I’d done that, she had me gather them into a single stack again and hand them back to her. Then she drew three cards and laid them in a pile at the table’s center—two vertically and one horizontally across their ‘feet.’

They really did look a lot like the Lady’s cards. Was that just coincidence? I’d heard of tarot cards. Were those some kind of ‘fairy’ thing? Surely, I told myself, not everyone who used them was of Piper’s kind.

The first card Stacy had laid down depicted a robed man, which she said stood for secret wisdom or power. On the second, an angel blew a trumpet as figures rose from graves below. She told me this one represented resurrection and rebirth, as well as searching for, or finding, ‘what was hidden.’ I did my best to act as if none of this were as eerily on target as it was. The horizontal card below them showed two beggars hobbling through deep snow beneath a fancy stained glass window full of pentagrams. She said it stood for adversity, being lost or homeless, and poverty. These three cards, she told me, represented my ‘current situation.’

I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my side, reminding myself that the third card revealed nothing both of us hadn’t already known, and that, given their vaguely defined meanings, any of them could as easily have applied to dozens of circumstances. This is all just an old carnie trick, I told myself. She can’t actually know anything unless I give it away, which I doubled my resolve not to do.

She laid four more cards on the table, one below the center three, one above, and one to either side, and said the cards below and above stood for my distant past and future, while the ones to left and right represented recent past and future.

On my ‘distant past’ card, a dazed-looking figure stared up at a sky full of golden cups containing bizarre images, which Stacy said represented ‘confusion or bewilderment—an indecisive or immobilized life.’

That could have described me at almost any point right up to that moment, but my ‘recent past’ card was even more unsettling. I hardly needed her to tell me that the skull-faced knight in black armor on his white horse meant Death.

Stacy looked confused. “Death can stand for many other things as well, but … have you just lost someone?”

I stared down at the card, then up at her, thinking of my ‘murdered uncle.’ Certainly I’d lost someone, if not quite the way she meant. How much did these fairy cards know? What ill luck had brought me here? Had Catcher known more about me than he’d let on somehow—and done this to me on purpose? I started thinking fervently about the cover story Rain and I had invented, hoping that, if there was anything to these cards, they’d read that instead.

“I…think so. Yes,” I said, reviewing Rain’s instructions again about covering my ass if someone started pressing me. “I can’t actually remember. Can we…just go on?”

She gazed at me in visible concern. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Me too,” I replied with feeling. “Um…how does this work…exactly?”

“It just does. Do you see some pattern here with meaning for you?”

I shook my head, not about to fall into that trap. “Not really. Are…we done?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Not even halfway through yet.”

Great, I thought. If she plays the ‘beaten-by-a-troll-at-fifty’ card, I’m so screwed.

My two future cards were both women. I can’t remember clearly what the ‘distant future’ woman looked like, but Stacy said she stood for ‘the influence of women.’

Like Piper? I thought. And The Lady? I was sweating even more heavily now.

The ‘near future’ card meant less to me then than any of the others, but I would soon wish I had understood its warning. It was the Queen of Swords, and stood, Stacy said, for powerful, intelligent women, made wise by suffering—sometimes at the hands of men. “Such women may indicate good fortune or great sorrow,” she added.

She placed the next card at the lower right-hand corner of the whole assembly, and said, “This one represents yourself in the larger scheme of things.”

It was called ‘The Fool,’ which seemed shockingly appropriate. I began to wonder if there were any cards in this deck that did not apply to me.

Stacy told me The Fool stood for new life or new journeys, disruption or reversal of the status quo, new energy, optimism, happiness, innocence, naivety, and youth. “This is a very positive card, Matt!” she chirruped, as I struggled not to gape. Who was feeding her these tips?

She laid two more cards vertically above The Fool. The first was yet another queen. I remember neither what she looked like, nor what she meant now, but the card above her was a man hung upside down against a tree, and stood, Stacy claimed, for things like adaptation, constructive sacrifice, rebirth, transformation, and “things turned literally upside down.”

I was fighting an urge to run from the store now, telling myself again that these cards were so vaguely all-inclusive, any of them might describe anything or anyone at all. … And yet, she just kept pegging me. I half expected Anselm and his army to come crashing in right then, but I was stuck now. Insisting that we stop would only tell her how on target all this was.

“Now,” Stacy announced, “we draw the final card, representing your ultimate outcome.” Above fool, queen, and hanged man, she set a lovely woman, floating in the center of a great green wreath, naked but for one loosely winding purple cloth. “The World!” Stacy exclaimed. “Achievement, fulfillment, satisfaction. This is very good! And in combination with these others…” Her cheery look became confused. “Well, some of this seems very strange, actually. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Maybe we should draw a few more cards for clarity.”

She had me take a card at random from the remaining fanned-out deck, then turned it over and set it down overlapping Death in my recent past. It showed a dead man lying face down with a back full of swords, and drew a stricken look from Stacy.

“What does that one mean?” I asked, certain I didn’t want to know.

She just shook her head. “Not yet. What matters is the finished pattern, not the single cards. We need to see a little more.”

She had me draw another card, and atop the mysterious queen of my distant future fell a happy couple gazing up at a rainbow of cups while their children played nearby. “That’s much better,” Stacy murmured.

She had me draw another card “to clarify my final outcome,” and across my fortunate ‘World’ card fell a white tower struck by lightning in a coal-black sky, figures plummeting head-first from its ruined crown. Stacy threw a hand across her mouth. “Draw another one, Matt,” she said quietly. “This is much too contradictory. In fact…draw two.”

She was clearly trying to cheat my fate by burying it in alternatives. That seemed obvious. But I could hardly begrudge her the attempt. I slid two more cards to her, face down.

She turned them over and crowed in delight, slapping them triumphantly atop The World and The Tower of my ‘final outcome.’ The first card showed a smiling man seated before a blue curtain under an arch of cups. The second depicted a naked woman kneeled by an outdoor pond against a field of stars. She was scooping water from the pool. Stacy pressed a hand against her heart as if recovering from a scare. “That’s it, then,” she said. “Let’s do your reading.”

“What? Wasn’t all this my reading?”

She shook her head. “I told you, only the completed pattern tells us anything.” She gazed back down at the cards seeming riveted by what she saw. I silently looped my cover story, still hoping to confuse whatever tattletale controlled these things. “What I’m seeing,” Stacy said without looking up, “is…quite incredible.”

“It is?” I asked, praying not to hear her start blurting out all my deepest secrets.

“Yes! To begin with, more than half these cards are Major Arcana, and none of them are reversed! And this,” she said, pointing to Death and the dead man full of swords, “suggests you’ve recently lost…” She fell silent, looking up at me in obvious distress. “What on earth’s been done to you?”

I felt almost faint, and my fear must have been quite visible. Stacy suddenly looked even paler. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said quietly, “but, whatever it was, you must be much braver than I thought. You really have no one in the world, and nowhere left to go now, do you?”

I shook my head, no longer trying to keep my mouth from hanging open.

“I’ll do whatever I can to help you,” she said gently. “I’m sure Lita will too.”

“Thank you,” I mumbled, as it began to dawn on me that, despite all of this, she might still have no idea what these goddamn cards were all but screaming at her. Maybe this would even help me out somehow…

“But that’s all just your recent past.” She took a deep breath. “There are quite a few powerful women in this pattern.” She grinned at me. “That may mean quite a bit of luck in love.”

She really doesn’t know, I thought, weak with relief. I’m still safe.

“All the mystery and secret knowledge here probably just reflects whatever you’re choosing not to tell me about what’s happened to you—appropriately, I’m sure. I’m not trying to violate your privacy, Matt. But the rest of this pattern is the most amazing part. It indicates that you will draw the attention of many great powers, and that you have a destiny that’s simply…” She shook her head. “It’s huge—the kind that will affect a lot of people. You’re going to be someone very important, Matt!”

“So…what kind of destiny, exactly?” I asked, glancing at the shattered tower in my ‘final outcome,’ still feeling far from reassured.

“I have no idea. The cards don’t work that way. They just point at important themes and general directions, not details. But if that tower’s got you worried—and I’ll admit it worried me—I think you can relax. There are few cards more fortunate than the last two you drew. They remove any doubt that you’ll be successful in the end. The Tower may just mean your destiny will resolve very suddenly, or be preceded by some unexpected conflict or hardship. However unpleasant things may get for a time, though, you’re going to come out a winner, Matthew. The Ten of Cups in your distant future strengthens that outcome even more, though, oddly…” She fell silent, gazing at the cards in apparent consternation. “The Priestess there suggests that your achievement may happen secretly somehow, or remain unknown to all but just a few—which seems kind of strange, since the other cards here suggest lots of people will benefit.” She gazed at me intently, then said, more to herself than to me, “You’ve been touched by something very powerful, I think. …I wonder what—and why.”

Okay. This really had to stop. I wondered how much good her apparent cluelessness would do me if she ever shared this with others who knew better how to put the clues together.

As if in answer to my prayers, a woman’s voice came from the shop’s entrance behind me. “Hello? Stacy?”

“We’re over here,” called Stacy.I shook my head urgently. “Don’t tell her about the cards,” I whispered. “It’s…personal.”

“Of course,” she said. “I would never.” She aimed a smile over my head. “Lita, there’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”

 I turned around and got my first look at Lita. Despite everything those cards had tried to tell me, all I saw was a beautiful young woman with a sweet smile undiminished by her gothy presentation. I had trouble focusing on any of that, however. My head was still too filled with anxiety about the bomb I feared that tarot reading might just have set ticking.

As things turned out, I wasn’t wrong to worry, just very mistaken about what kind of bomb to fear, and where it was actually hidden.