MAJOR ARCANA: Part Two, Chapter 3

The High Priestess

Major Arcana is a serialized novel for paid subscribers. For more details, both about the novel and about subscriber amenities, please see the Preface. Because this chapter works as a standalone short story and can therefore serve well as a preview of the novel for free subscribers and general browsers, I am not paywalling it for now. It’s dark, but please enjoy!

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PART TWO

Chapter 3. | The High Priestess

Simon Magnus ended up in Valerie Karns’s house that night. Not far from the Magnuses’ dark house, but on the other side of the dark forest, it sat behind a crumbling, graffiti-bright train trestle in a cul-de-sac. In that dead end squatted a crowded warren of small houses where the labor force of the town’s bygone industries had once worked. Now, anyone might live there, amid the overgrown lawns and cars on cement blocks and grime-blackened siding—anyone who couldn’t afford to live anywhere better. Valerie Karns lived alone with her mother, a hairdresser by day and bartender by night. Her mother was gone from the house from seven in the morning to midnight, except for the nights she spent in the bedroom upstairs of the bar, plying yet a third trade.

Valerie Karns had discovered magic a few years earlier, when her former stepfather—he’d managed the hardware store next to the bar where her mother worked—still lived in the house. He would visit her bedroom during the long nights when her mother was out. She pretended to sleep, her back to the door, one of the many cats who lived in the house pressed purring to her chest, when he came in. His lowering bulk made the mattress sink; she would roll, unless she clutched the corner of the mattress by her fingernails, into his lap. His silver-furred paunch like the back of a gorilla, the beer on his breath like sour pennies, the way the air whistled in one hairy nostril, the way his rough fingers—the nails permanently grimed in black oil—stroked her back with cajoling affection: these tormented her, sleeping and waking. The cat would shriek, would leap from the bed. She never made a sound.

She would regularly climb the sagging wooden steps that gave pedestrians access to the trestle above the train tracks. She read the graffiti, never knowing what it meant—bright bloody hearts ringed with runes—and imagined leaping down onto a train and letting it either kill her or carry her somewhere, anywhere: elsewhere. 

She would walk from the public school to the public library: a pale gray building with a high red door, the vault of its lofty ceiling braced and crossed with wooden beams, its windows tall and colored like church windows, said to be the oldest building in the state. She felt cradled in its breadth. She would stay there until it closed, with the excuse of extracurricular activities and class projects. It wouldn’t save her from the nightly visitations, but it spared her more time with her stepfather than was strictly demanded by his power and her powerlessness. 

One night, leaving the library at eight o’clock, she spied him driving up and down the streets, looking for her, looking for her mother, looking for whatever else he might put his filthy fingers on. She ran back into the building and hurried unobserved to the bathrooms. She crouched on the seat of the last toilet in the ladies’ room during the final inspection. When the librarians locked the building and left, she climbed down, stiff-kneed, and spent the night in the library. 

It took hardly a minute to cross the whole one-room building—frigid on a fall night—that had housed the library for what to her, at age 12, in a bewildering and almost unnavigable universe, might as well have been hundreds or thousands of years. The oldest building in the state. Did it go back to Pilgrim times? Every school year, they started again at the Pilgrims. She had memorized the required facts of history. She had a good memory: she did well in school, since they didn’t ask much else of her but her memory—a memory of facts that didn’t matter to her and therefore didn’t hurt to remember. She had no idea, however, what these facts meant, or even when, exactly, they had happened in relation to her own time, to the ground she stood on. The library’s bare floorboards yawed and squealed; the glass of the tall, colored windows had begun to pool, ripple, and thicken at the bottoms of the panes. Glass, she’d heard in school, was not a solid; it was a slow liquid. It only seemed solid, but with enough time, it would change shape. Didn’t enough time change everything’s shape? What, then, she wondered, was a solid? 

She found a flashlight in a drawer behind the librarian’s desk. When the library was open, she’d stayed close to the children’s books to avoid suspicion, falling asleep over dull stories about children in miserable houses who escaped to have fabulous adventures or slightly more interesting stories about the children of other lands and how they spent their days herding yaks or llamas or diving for pearls or harvesting rice. She wondered if these latter children in their funny hats, whose everyday life the books presented as equivalent to the fabulous adventure in the other kind of book, didn’t feel as desperate to be somewhere and anywhere else as she did. “Elsewhere” attracted her because it was elsewhere, not anywhere in particular. There were things she loved in her house; she loved the cats, anyway. The whistle of air in her stepfather’s nostril, however, would have ruined even paradise.

That night, alone behind a locked red door, with the building closed, she could read what she wanted. Carefully keeping the flashlight lower than the windows, she went up and down the adult shelves. She noted where the sex books were on the nonfiction shelves the better to avoid them. 

She didn’t need information, didn’t need a language for what was happening to her. She had watched people tell her own story several times over on TV talk shows in the afternoon, between the time she got home from school and the time her stepfather got home from the hardware store. The stories gave her the words for her experience—“sexual abuse” and its accompanying paraphernalia: “penis,” for example, and “vagina”—but suggested to her that it simply had to be endured. Adults stuck together. They’d close ranks against you if you told, “close ranks” being a phrase she learned from those shows. Your mother wouldn’t believe you, other adults wouldn’t believe you, and the police wouldn’t believe you. The school might send you to a psychologist, who would try to figure out what was wrong with you. Doctors couldn’t prove your story one way or the others; the world is a dangerous place, and bruises may come from anywhere. 

Most of the people on those shows escaped just by growing up, by becoming one of them, allowing themselves to be changed by time. She asked herself if she thought she could wait that long. She usually had these conversations with herself on top of the trestle as the train clattered past below. Sometimes, even in adulthood, you were not safe. Your stepfather—your uncle, grandfather, mom’s boyfriend, priest, teacher, coach, cousin, camp counselor—could get at you indirectly. One of the adult women on those shows had 100 different people living inside her head, a team she’d formed to protect herself in childhood against the assault of mom’s boyfriend, a series of stronger souls who could live with what she called “the fear, pain, shame, and nausea.” This woman would start answering the show host’s question in a baby girl’s voice and finish it in an old man’s growl.

Valerie Karns felt everything but the shame: those talk shows had spared her shame by showing her how often these things happened all the time to people who had done nothing wrong, the same way floods and fires struck people on the local news that played when the talk shows were over. Valerie Karns wouldn’t have minded company inside her head, during the hours and hours of boredom that made up most days until the 15 minutes of terror and disgust in the night. She would sit on the floor of the bedroom while the cats slunk around her, and she would give them voices and personalities and pasts and complaints and praises. Mostly what she heard in her head was her own voice, like an outside commentator, steadying and reassuring her: “still early,” “not home yet,” “maybe not tonight,” “you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay”—the latter what her dad always said to her if she fell down and scraped her knee or hit her head and couldn’t stop crying, before her dad had to go live somewhere else, with somebody else’s daughter, or his own, but somebody else’s, too. 

The talk shows got one thing wrong, at least in her case. The hosts and guests often talked for a long time about how those who “molest children”—this was another name she learned for what was being done to her, what had started being done to her when she turned 11 and hadn’t stopped since, from the summer of one year to the fall of the next—worshiped the Devil. Her stepfather did not worship the Devil. He took her to church and Sunday school, whether her mother came home after Saturday night behind the bar to accompany them or not. She saw him go down on his knees, clench his hands against each other, press his scaly yellow knuckles painfully into his forehead, shut his eyes as if trying to keep tears in, and pray. She didn’t wonder why he prayed so hard; she knew, and he knew, and he knew that she knew that he needed forgiveness from God. He wouldn’t get it from her. She prayed, too, but God hadn’t spared her yet. The Sunday school teacher smiled and said, “God answers every prayer, but sometimes His answer is ‘no.’” In her situation, she concluded, Satan was not the problem, nor God the solution.

That night in the library, she found The Complete Book of Salem Witch Spells. The cover showed a witch from the Pilgrim times: a tall, thin girl with blazing red hair and glowing green eyes tied to a tree trunk, fire starting at the hem of her white dress, a ring of pale men in black hats surrounding her as she cried out in defiance to the dark trees rearing overhead. She remembered that the witches had been burned by people who went to church every Sunday, that the witches had been accused of Devil-worship. Valerie Karns’s eyes were gray, not green, but her hair was almost the same color as the witch on the cover of the book, and she was tall and thin, too—she hated being tall and thin, hated the way her stepfather always said, “You’re big for your age.”

Cross-legged on the floor, the flashlight held on a shelf above her in the grip of two hardcovers, she read in the book’s introduction that magic is a tool for bringing what you want into the world, for aligning what they called your will with reality. The book quoted a man it said they once accused of being evil (she doubted all such accusations by now): “Love is the law, love under will.” She browsed through the spells and stopped on the one headed “Curse Your Enemy.” She didn’t have the bitter herbs or the lock of her stepfather’s hair or the egg of the raven or the water in which the moon had shone. She couldn’t start a fire in the library. She ran to to the window and looked up: the moon was full. She took this as a sign to proceed. She went back to the book and said the words three times. She even shouted the final couplet.

Lay him down in the dust!
Break his crown, dry up his lust!

She fell asleep curled around the spell book, in the white circle the flashlight made, until its battery  burned out around three in the morning. In her dream, she ran, the cats at her feet, slinking and swirling around her ankles, from her bedroom to the woods behind her house. There she found the woman with red hair and green eyes, who was also, she didn’t know how, the Sunday-school teacher at the church her stepfather took her to (the actual Sunday-school teacher was gray-headed and plump and short, not tall and thin and flame-haired). This woman was tying her stepfather with sharp-looking twine to the trunk of a tree, the twine slicing into the bulk of his silver-furred gorilla-back belly, spilling blood down the thick silver hairs. She looked up and saw Valerie Karns, and she said, this witch who was also a Sunday-school teacher, “I’ll do this for you, daughter, but it’s not free. You’ll have to pay me later.”

Valerie Karns woke on the cold floor in the dark. From where she lay, she could see out one of the tall colored windows up to the full moon. To the moon, she whispered, “Please do it.” 

The next morning, her mother, who had come home early the night before, beat her on the shoulders and back with the heel of a high-heeled shoe. “You think you can stay out all night, you bitch, you little whore?” Her stepfather calmly watched at the kitchen table, drumming his thick fingers, his breath whistling in one nostril.

The next weekend, an icy rain fell as the weather turned: fall into winter. Her stepfather’s car slipped off the road and smashed into a tree trunk. He flew through the windshield and the trunk split his skull in two; then the car caught fire and burned his corpse. The God at the church, He sometimes said, “No,” but this other god, this god who lived in the moon and the woods, she said, “Yes.” 

Simon Magnus knew this story. Valerie Karns had told Simon Magnus all of it on the 13 months’ worth of weeknights they spoke on the phone and weekends they spent in her bedroom, the 13 months between the night she killed the bird and the night she killed herself. Simon Magnus didn’t think the comics press wanted to hear anything as unpleasant as her recollections of her childhood, however, so Simon Magnus never said a word about Valerie Karns’s stepfather or about how Valerie Karns discovered magic. 

Simon Magnus presented Valerie Karns to the public as the “origin story” of this superhero writer, the mysterious figure who had initiated Simon Magnus into the mystery before disappearing into it herself. She was, in Simon Magnus’s telling, a kind of naturally occurring phenomenon: a Gothic dryad of the greater Salem forest, and, with charming self-deprecation, even though Simon Magnus was in fact deprecating her, as a mundane goth girl, provincial countercultural flotsam of the late 20th century, randy and precocious.

Simon Magnus told the press that when they arrived together at her empty house on that night they first met in the woods, as soon as they had come through the back door into the stinking kitchen, amid the dirty dishes piled in the sink, with their shoe soles sticking to the filthy linoleum and the cats hungrily circling their legs, she immediately grabbed Simon Magnus’s penis until it hardened, her hands still stained with bird’s blood. Because she later whispered to Simon Magnus the whole story of her life, Simon Magnus understood privately, but never said in public, why that girl might have felt the need to seize control of that organ as soon as she possibly could. Randy mischief, despite what Simon Magnus implied to fans and fawning journalists, had had nothing whatsoever to do with it. After she’d jerked Simon Magnus to climax, she put her hand over her mouth, went back through the door, and vomited in the yard.

Hand in hand, she led Simon Magnus up to her bedroom. Crinkled and torn magazine pages of Paris and London were taped to the walls, next to hand-drawn, hand-painted Baphomets and burning witches, all of it lurid in the red bulb fixed in her bedside lamp. A message scrawled in red nail polish on her dresser mirror read, “Love is the law.” 

She dropped herself to the carpet in a blossom of white tulle and invited Simon Magnus to sit too. She did a Tarot spread. She’d made the deck herself out of Polaroid pictures. She posed for all the figures, for all the arcana, major and minor, though Simon Magnus didn’t know they were called that yet. She’d taken the photos with the camera’s 10-second timer and labeled the glossy white bottoms with the fruit-scented markers so popular in those years. She handed Simon Magnus the top card to demonstrate her handiwork: The Lovers. On the card, Valerie Karns stood naked next to a mirror, doubled, a mustache and a cock-and-balls drawn with charming crudeness in black marker (licorice-scented) on her reflection. The whole deck smelled of artificial blueberry, lemon, strawberry, banana, chocolate—smelled sugary, like a candy shop, especially amid the musky incense perfume of her bedroom. 

She did a simple three-card past-present-future spread. On the dirty pink carpet, unvacuumed and stained with nail polish, she laid down three figures of the major arcana, her own self in three guises: the Empress (she wore a cheap tiara), the High Priestess (a pair of real-looking antlers sprouted from her red curls), and the Magician (she held a still-leafy branch as a wand and wore a robe with an infinity sign—a lemniscate—hand-painted in red on the front). 

Simon Magnus told interviewers that there on that dirty floor, with this handmade Tarot spread, she had manifested for Simon Magnus precisely what Simon Magnus had dreamed in the forest while reading Burroughs: what a comic book would look like if absolute intelligence were applied to its form. 

“Valerie, darling Valerie, showed me the archetypes in their journey through the life cycle, the cycle itself available in every temporal permutation, represented as a spatial arrangement that made each image gather meaning to itself from every other—and it could be re-arranged! Time was not linear. You could stand above it, see the past to your left and the future to your right, and then you could reshuffle the deck and live them again in a different order. This is what God sees: not time as a line or even as a circle, but as every moment at once and in combination with every other. God sees time the way we see space. Reading a Tarot spread or reading a comic book, therefore, makes us God—or the closest thing to it.”

Simon Magnus would only be able to articulate the insight later, after reflection and study, but the whole of the thought crashed into awareness before it could be said in words that night in Valerie Karns’s red bedroom. Tarot and comics uniquely represented the fourth dimension in two dimensions by turning time into space. This placed the Tarot reader and the comics reader up in the fifth dimension, a divine plane, maybe the divine plane. Tarot and comics, then, were the highest forms of artistic consciousness, despite both forms’ association with fortune tellers and smut peddlers, gypsies by the roadside and hack artists who couldn’t get hired anywhere else. “‘Despite’ or ‘because’?” Simon Magnus would rhetorically ask interviewers and audiences—for wasn’t wisdom always scattered in the trash, pearls before swine, gems amid offal, shards of divinity lodged in the prison of the flesh?

Valerie Karns used the magic until it ran out. She’d conjured up Simon Magnus the summer before they met, she confessed, sitting naked in the woods in a circle of salt at three A.M. and imploring Aphrodite to bring her a man who might understand her and who would handle her gently. Simon Magnus handled her gently enough. Simon Magnus would tug the coils of her hair straight and then let them spring back into their spirals and tickle her cheek, as she patiently explained everything she knew about the art of magic. 

After graduation, she couldn’t conjure the money for college or any job better than the night shift at the gas station convenience store by the side of the highway. Her mother would come home from the bar at one in the morning, wake her up and shake her, ask her for rent money, threaten to throw her out. By the time she graduated high school and Simon Magnus entered senior year, Simon Magnus was already planning to go to the city. Simon Magnus asked her to come, but she simply asked, “What will I do there?” as if she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, as if some spell, some salt circle, held her in Hollow Well.  She sat for hours between midnight and five behind the convenience store counter, at first fearing and then wishing that someone would come in off the highway and shoot her dead.

She had stopped drawing and stopped taking pictures, even as Simon Magnus became more inspired than ever, writing poems, planning long comic-book series, making an attempt at a novel—the latter about her, about the working-class witch of Hollow Well, about the Gothic dryad of the greater Salem forest. Simon Magnus called her every night, Simon Magnus read her every word Simon Magnus wrote in those 13 months.

Was this the price she had to pay for using magic first to harm another? On the other hand, was this misfortune—her isolation, her dead-end life—a warning that she still owed the debt? The rules were the rules: you couldn’t plead self-defense before the bar of karma. Gradually, she stopped answering Simon Magnus’s calls, stopped showing up for work, stopped getting out of bed. At midnight on the first wintry Saturday in November, she climbed the sagging wooden stairs to the trestle, her bare feet slipping in the sleet. She walked to the middle of the bridge, climbed up on the rail, and didn’t even wait for a train. She didn’t need a train to take her where she was going. She escaped from the prison of the flesh.

“What does it mean?” Simon Magnus had asked Valerie Karns of the Tarot spread on the dirty carpet of her red bedroom that first night, drowsy from the orgasm she had, without invitation, wrenched from the budding writer’s body with hands still coat in bird-blood.

“It means you’ll go backward even as you go forward.”

Simon Magnus wouldn’t tell the interviewers her answer. Simon Magnus would tell the interviewers what Simon Magnus thought it meant: the past was Mother Magnus, the Empress; the present was Valerie Karns, the High Priestess; and the future was the Simon Magnus Simon Magnus would eventually become—the Magician, of course. About what it had cost Valerie Karns to become and to remain, for as long as she was able to remain, the High Priestess, Simon Magnus remained silent.