Authors: Kirsten Arcadio
He was talking again, so I broke off my inner dialogue to listen.
‘Our Charismatic movement is not bound to dogma as other movements are.’
I raised my eyebrows. I could hear my own father saying ‘What a load of codswallop!’ Instead, I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and pretended to write notes. Realistically, I don’t need to do that. My memory is good enough. After all, I have a first from Oxford although I suspect this would be lost on Iain.
At this point I asked him if he minded if I smoked. He said he did, which disconcerted me. Smoking helps me to concentrate better, sometimes.
‘In my organisation we don’t approve of vices,’ he said. ‘Julia and I don’t drink or smoke. Well, we might have the occasional drink, but that’s it.’
I wondered why he said ‘organisation’ rather than ‘community’ but just nodded, keen for him to return to our previous topic of conversation. He was boring me. When he didn’t speak, I prompted.
‘So, tell me how your ‘brand’ of religion, your philosophy-’ I chuckled but he did not reciprocate, ‘-compares to that of other organisations or movements?’
He cleared his throat and began talking in that strange monotone of his, ‘Well, take the Rapture for example. It’s close now, really close.’
I nodded. There was a lot of this about. Again, I could hear my father laughing. A bit louder, if anything. I wanted to laugh along with him, but managed to stop myself just in time. Iain didn’t seem to notice, and continued talking, as if I was lapping up every word.
‘Religious leaders, you know. They just can’t see it. It’s going to hit them like a bus, but they just don’t see it. We see it, because we have the gift of prophecy - that’s one of the gifts Charismatics have. But they don’t. They give us no choice.’
I was thoughtful afterwards. I do not think him particularly intelligent and his lack of biblical references intrigues me. In my experience, people of his standing and profession normally quote regularly from whichever holy text they adhere to. An irritating but strangely comforting trait that Iain does not possess. He is devoid of comforting traits.
‘It’s another thing we have to drum into people here,’ he continued, as if this were the most normal thing to say in the world. ‘We have to deal with a lot of people who have lost their way.’
And I thought,
deal with, deal with…
The words echoed about in my head. They rattled and shook. Julia was nowhere to be seen throughout the conversation. Even now, as I write three hours later, I cannot place the whereabouts of Julia.
Thoughts of Martha and Tony plagued me in the days which followed. Where, only a few weeks ago, I’d been working to make a difference to my patients, making slow progress in my relations with the other villagers, now I was hurtling towards something else. Someone was trying to scare me and that wasn’t all. I was worried about Joan, her otherworldly air too reminiscent of the one which had settled around Martha in the months leading up to her death. Isolation in a small place like this was alienating, I knew this better than anybody, but there was something else. Both Joan and Martha before her were afraid.
Alone in my consulting room, I flicked back through the diary. Something about its yellowed pages, which emanated a peculiar mix of perfume and cigarette smoke, brought to mind my childhood. I screwed up my eyes trying to remember the brand of perfume my mother had used. As ever, when I thought of her, I blinked back a tear or two. My younger self hadn’t often been given the chance to snuggle up and breathe her in. Nevertheless, there was something familiar about this scent. I racked my brains for clues, fighting an uncomfortable feeling the answer was lying just out of reach.
Flicking to the back, I read through the last couple of entries.
Dream journal, October
Again, the same dream.
I entered the occult shop, pushing on the door with renewed vigour and force. The glass was cold on my fingertips and my refracted expression, nestling within its depths, was intense and clear. It slid away as I moved onwards, leaving the door to close softly behind me.
A phone rang and the sound reverberated around, cutting through that murky air which lurked around, clinging to the bookshelves and the indistinct piles on the floor. I moved towards the sound over the obstacle course which lay between the door and the till where the phone was situated. The ringing became shriller as I got closer. It was almost unbearable, and I covered my ears as I drew level with the till.
Then, I stretched out my hand and picked up the receiver, which was black and covered in a thick film of dust. As the dust slid off it I noticed the floor was covered in ash. The light changed and I was standing in the middle of the clearing with the receiver in my hand, the shop having fallen away to leave nothing but burning ashes and a till with a phone resting on it. I was exposed to the woods.
In the distance I saw a group of men and women in ball gowns and tuxedos advance towards me through the trees. Tentatively, I put the phone to my ear as if it were providing me with a lifeline or escape, hearing instead, a deep, lilting voice.
‘The Hanged Man, The High Priestess, The Hermit, The Moon and Death. Let them be a warning to you.’
I looked up to see that it was too late. The moon above came out from the cloud covering to stare down at me, directing the stares of the silent and waiting crowd. So I ran. I ran on gravel, as fast as I could through the trees, so fast I was almost floating above the turgid mud and mass of dark, matted leaves below. The deserted car park was completely black making the burning light behind the barn windows brighter. I got closer and closer but then I found I was running in slow motion, unable to get right up to the windows to see inside.
Above, the moon was bright and full, mottled grey cloud moving swiftly past it, failing to eclipse its hypnotic brightness. A desire to float towards it instead pushed me right up to the window, face against the glass, up close to unseeing figures, now inside. A falling sensation threatened, but I held on as I caught sight of a tall brunette in the centre.
A young woman knelt before her, blindfolded with her hands outstretched, pleading.
Without warning the light inside the barn turned to burning flame, high and bright, back-lighting the silent faces inside. The tall woman turned, and her eyes were upon me as the flames licked higher, engulfing and swallowing the ring around. She raised her hands to the sky, which opened up above my head, and threw burning cards into the air shouting:
‘Beware, the occult!’
Dream diary, October
I sat in charred remains. There were others with me, and there were cinders smoking all around us, rising up slowly to taper into the blue sky above our heads, and I could just make out the bottom of the bonfire, in which the heat of the fire remnants worked away at a pile of golden binders, peeling away at their pages, layer by layer. A pair of dark eyes regarded me from across the way, remaining on my face as their owner spoke, her hair cascading around hollow cheek bones.
‘You are important to the community. We have a plan for you…,’ the cheekbones said, ‘You sit between worlds, between this world and the next, between heaven and hell-’
‘Between…?’ I interjected, but the eyes just looked over at me, unmoved.
The bones continued. ‘I was put here to help lead the flock, to identify the lonely and the lost. I even counted you among those – I thought I could help you. But no. Just look at you.’
The eyes changed and their darkness merged into deep purple, the colour of death. I could feel their vice-like grip on my soul and feel their pull, their calling to my loneliness. I felt the darkness encircle me and the smoke from the fire thicken as it snaked its way over to where I was sitting, its edges tainted by the burnished gold of burning books between us.
At that point the diary just seemed to tail off. There were no more entries. What had happened to the owner of the diary after this point? I flicked back and forth pondering the New Age shop and its contents. I sat back in the chair and thought for a moment. The books described bore an uncanny resemblance to the volume I’d found next to Martha’s body on the night of her death. I cast my mind back to the reading which had been left on my coffee table and I didn’t like it. Rummaging about in my bag, I fished out my phone and brought up the photo stream to browse through the images I’d snapped of the cards that night. I remember Nonna Rosa telling me how the Death card had more to do with change than death itself. She had taught me not to fear change and I’d taken her advice all my life, although some might say, I embraced too much of it. I was accustomed to that sinking feeling brought about by making a big change in life. I knew how it felt to leave people and places behind and move on. The feeling of dread was so acute I could taste it on my lips and feel it in the shiver of remembered anticipation which shuddered through my body. That feeling of an unknown quantity, of a path without a clear ending. I reflected on how, for many months, my world had been closing in on me. It was an ever-decreasing circle, a trap maybe? I felt as if I had been walking a corridor that lead to nowhere, one which presented me with an array of tightly shut doors. Had the owner of the diary felt this way too? And had the person who had left the card reading wanted to warn me of a change, maybe a catastrophic one? Or was their purpose more sinister?
I wandered out into the staff kitchen with my mug, still deep in thought. A couple of the practice nurses, Jenny and Marie, were chatting in the far corner by the kettle. They looked up from their conversation and smiled.
‘Did you know that change is like dying?’ I said to them, taking the kettle from its stand to fill it with water. The two older women’s smiles became more polite and tight-lipped, but I continued. ‘That's why the Death card in the Tarot signifies change and transformation’.
The more amiable of the two nurses, Jenny, stopped smiling abruptly and frowned. Pouring boiling water onto my tea bag, I took my leave of them and strolled back into my office, humming as I went.
Sipping my tea, I reflected that change was like death and rebirth. I had waded many times through that deathly no man’s land between one phase of life and the next. My maudlin mood sank me further into old memories. I wanted to remember those moments again: a last day at work, or in a community before moving on. It was always the same: goodbyes, messages, celebrations, sadness, revelation and surprise. It was as if the newly opened door ahead provided some illumination, throwing a few choice shadows on the old life before it slammed shut again. But in this village there were no open doors, just a long corridor full of tightly closed ones. For once I had no idea which door to open next.
As if someone had read my thoughts, the door of my consulting room banged open.
‘Dr Lewis, you need to come out here now. Please! I can’t find any of the doctors!’ It was Lucy, the younger of the receptionists, her neat blond hair slightly dishevelled, mascara smudged on one side, her face wiped clean of its usual, slightly disagreeable smirk.
I got up without a word and followed Lucy's scurrying form down the corridor towards the front desk and waiting room. As I moved forwards, a strangled, screaming whine reached my eardrums. I broke into a run, almost tripping over my high heels. Cursing, I entered the waiting room and, drawing level with the source of the screaming, sank to my knees. The ringing in my ears filled up the space around me before time slowed down.
In the waiting room a bunch of people were crowded around the large, wide window at the front. The small crowd ebbed and flowed around the source of drama breaking up and regrouping in a continuous circle of controlled panic. I moved to the middle of the group and leaned over a thrashing body, moving quickly and calmly, masking anxiety I couldn’t reveal. Back-up was coming through the surrounding corridors in the form of an older, bearded man and a smart, grey haired woman. They joined me in a futile struggle before death overcame the room, blanketing all the inhabitants but claiming only one.
A woman’s lifeless, outstretched hand uncurled to drop a piece of paper which floated to the ground, almost unnoticed.
Hours later, I sat at my desk, dishevelled and exhausted, my clothes crumpled as if still cradling the dead woman's head in the folds of their material. Joan had been pronounced dead at 6pm after half an hour of resuscitation. The hospital paramedics had arrived to help us out but to no avail. Then the police had been called. Joan’s daughter had been distraught and the police clearly worried. There was no suicide note and no previous history of drug overdoses. The police had questioned those of us who had attempted to resuscitate Joan. Just to make things harder. Or easier. I wasn’t sure.
With a sinking feeling, I tabbed through my computerised notes, searching for clues which might have pointed to more than just a mild depression, but could find none. At least that corroborated with the information I had given the police. But my most recent meeting with Joan played on my mind. I wondered if I should tell the police exactly what Joan had told me at that session.
Much later that night I returned home to find a note under my front door. Impatient with junk mail and door drops I crumpled it with one hand and was about to throw it straight in the paper bin when a sixth sense made me stop and unfold it. I reached into my pocket for an identical piece of crumpled paper, which I had retrieved from the floor next to Joan’s body with the intention of passing it on to her family. Uncurling both balls of paper I smoothed them out on the table and studied them carefully, a sense of the unreal enveloping me as I did so. Joan’s paper contained two scribbled lines above and below a photocopied image. It would have been bad enough if it had just contained the handwritten lines, which were written in the same scrawly hand as the message on my own piece of paper:
‘Who is not with me is against me.’
An unpleasant, tingling sensation took hold as I bent to scrutinise it further. Like a crab, the crumpled paper tried to screw itself up again, as if to protect its contents. Opening it up further, I jumped when I saw the image on the page: it was a photocopy of the Death card. Whether it was from my Tarot pack was another matter. I could not tell and I studied the image for a while noting that it did, indeed, look exactly like the Death card from my own pack. Underneath were scrawled the words: