It felt good to put it to Lane in such a manner but three days hence the weight of my accursed predicament proved a heavy burden indeed. Certainly my father had a slew of attorneys at his beck and call, but having been stripped of my executor status, his estate and all its powers lay beyond my grasp. Lying on my thin mattress, I felt a cold dread seep deep into my bones.
"That's a sticky web you're caught in," said the spider, marvelling approvingly at my handiwork. I didn't appreciate that attribution and when he further advised me that the best way to get unstuck of a web was to not get stuck in the first place, I slapped the wall in anger and sent him zipping back up his web-line and scuttling away into the corner shadows of my cell.
"Rather dramatique, non?" The sultry voice sat me bolt up on my bed.
"Where the hell did you come from?" I said. "Have you any idea the trouble you've made for me?" I called for the guards, shouting at the top of my lungs but my voice only echoed off the cell walls and left my ears ringing in pain. Desiree approached to put a hand on my shoulder but I gnashed my teeth, warning her not to touch me.
"S'il te plaît, mon cherie, why do you resist me so?"
"Stay away from me, you harpy."
She wore the same getup as last time, red trench coat and ruby heels. "Comme tu veux," she said, sitting in the chair. "But we cannot forever play ze baby swaddled. Especially if we want ze far more adult things in life, hein?" She crossed her legs at that, their supple musculature enough to distract me momentarily, but I'd already seen her ugly side and remarked upon it bluntly.
"Why did you kill Doctor Wheeler?" I demanded to know. "And who's letting you out of your cell?"
She sighed. "I see monsieur Winston has lancé the stone into the pond, n'est pas?"
"Never mind Lane. Answer my question, Desiree du Coeur." Why her name should have rippled her waters any I didn't know, but so it did—and in quite tidal proportions. Springing from the chair, she pushed me down on my mattress and threw a leg over me.
"What are you doing? Get off me!"
"Ah, but is zat what you really want?"
"Yes," I began to say but she slapped the word from my mouth with a wicked blow. A thousand needles rained into my cheek whilst she stared down at me, yellow irises glinting in the dark, like some satanic owl in purgatorial judgement. "Never lie to me," she said.
Terror choked my breath as her white hand clutched my throat, her fingernails digging ever more sharply into my neck, suffocating me of all hostility until finally her red smile was all I could see. Slowly it came towards me, pressing down upon my lips, and just as her damp lizard-tail tongue penetrated my mouth the bed lurched into a furious disposition, its cast iron legs scraping against the floor, faster and faster until suddenly the frame was bashing against the walls of my cell at terrifying momentum. A howling wind whipped through my cell and like a desperate captain, I beseeched mercy before the thunderous storm broke the mast of my ship.
Alas I was overcome.
"Bon," said Desiree, slipping easily from the bed. "You'll feel better now, hein?"
"Go to hell," I whispered, feeling only shame and indignation as I rolled onto my side, hugged my knees to my chest, and cursed Desiree as a hell-come succubus. I couldn't deny, however, that something inside me seemed to have shifted, and whilst I shan't be so vulgar to use the word blockage, I did note a peculiar freedom to the associations forming concurrently in my thoughts.
"Mais, bien sur," said Desiree. "After ze storm, ze sky is clear."
"Enough," I said. "You're not trying that doctor bit with me again."
"Quite so, mon cherie. What you need is ze advocate."
She stepped from my cell and, blast her to Dante, I had little choice but to give chase. If Desiree knew of a lawyer then perhaps they could be persuaded to take on my case. And so, snuffing out what tiny amount of pride I had left, I followed her into the hallway where nothing seemed to be stirring save for the one-eyed man shouting, "Get back in your cage, little jew rat!"
I cannot say this came as any shock, in fact his ugly ravings had long since become woven into the background tapestry of my purgatory. But for some reason his words now affected me with marked difference: where once they'd clawed for submission, they now emboldened me as a night-thief on the run. Noticing this, I further observed a queer shimmering in the air, and something about the hallway itself seemed to perplex my eyes like a dessert mirage. To be clear, the hallway looked in no way different. Its dimensions were as I knew them: three paces wide, with seven steel doors between ends. And yet, as I walked towards the one-eyed man's shouting (I'd thought to smile defiantly at him through the shatterproof window), I found that for every step I took, I traversed only half the distance. Rather more concerning was that by the time I'd gotten from my own cell (#4) to the one-eyed man's cell (#7), I'd passed four doors instead of two.
"What the hell is this?" I said, steadying myself against the wall for I suddenly felt quite woozy.
"Clarity, mon chérie," said Desiree. "Ne t'inquiète pas."
"Actually," came a voice. "I'd be very concerned if I were you."
I regret to say that I cannot articulate quite the strangeness of this new voice other than to relate it to a kind of mad bird. I could, however, readily locate its origin to the cell immediately before #7—a cell which I reiterate had never been there, at least to my knowledge, and to which I will refer hereon as cell #6.
I approached gingerly, attempting to peer through the window but to no avail. A smoky haze obscured its interior. Desiree suggested that I simply open the door, and to my utter surprise I found the handle yielded to my grasp. The man inside wore a raggedy black robe with a rope for a belt. He was not but skin and bone underneath, and what skin there was was so heavily tattooed that it appeared blue. He was also holding a skull. "I knew you were up to something, Desiree."
Desiree smiled. "Bon soir, Yidoni. You look agitated."
"—agitated. Yes. Very perceptive of you. Have my job in a minute I think not! Now turn around and take him back." He cast his gaze upon me, the left eye a brilliant green in the centre of a spider web tattoo, the right eye a luminous purple amidst panda-patch of black. "You hear me, boy? For once in your life listen to what I'm telling you. Go back."
The word itself seemed to shove me backwards. More than that, I felt a strong impulse to run away as fast as I could, which probably I would have had not Desiree been holding my arm. But why? Certainly I'd spent enough time with Raven and his ilk to be unfazed by such mild an offence as a reprimanding eye. And yet there I was, knee spasming in angst.
I took the magnanimous approach. "I'm sorry, have we met?"
The tattooed man threw up his hands and squawked like a crane. "Unbelievable! You hear that, Gus? Twenty-three years rolling the goat-bones, and he wants to know have we met!" He brought the skull to his ear and nodded emphatically. "Ha! Like Isaac on the altar is exactly right, Gus." He came close and jabbed a bony finger into my belly. "But mark it well, boy, Abraham she is not, and rams do not these pastures frolic." He moved back from me and then quickly leaned in again, adding: "To be clear, this time you'll be slaughtered."
And with that he dumped himself into the chair behind his desk, muttering to his skull in a language I didn't understand.
"What does he mean: for once in my life?" I asked Desiree in an undertone. "I've never met him before."
"Pay him no mind, mon chérie," she said. "He is always pessimistic."
I looked down at my stomach. It was twisting and turning as if I'd eaten something disagreeable. He hadn't poked me that hard though…
"Well don't just stand there, boy," said Yidoni. "Sit down."
"I thought you wanted me to go?" I said.
"No, I warned you to go. Want has nothing to do with me. That's her department."
Desiree declined to elucidate his meaning, instead guiding me to sit on the black-sheeted bed. I was thankful for the respite and, still woozy, my elastic vision took in the host of odd symbols that were scratched across the walls. I wondered if he'd done it with the aforementioned goat bones, but where in the world would he have gotten goat bones? Presumably from the same place he'd gotten the black bedding, the black tablecloth, and the black scented-candle.
"Probablement, he wonders about ze dirty old skull…" said Desiree.
Yidoni started wildly. "Dirty old skull!" He pushed it into my face. "This, you uncouth ignoramus, is Lugubrio Guster, prognosticator of prognosticators, and foreteller of fortunes. And mark it well, boy, we've saved your hide more than a few times."
"You're a… soothsayer?" I asked.
"I'm Yidoni," he said, puffing out his scraggy chest. "Prophet of Pithom, Legacy of the Open Eye, and Order of Yadu'a First Class."
"But around here we just call him Hunch," said Desiree.
"Oh shut up," said Yidoni, berating her to leave until the dirty old skull apparently interrupted him, and Yidoni promptly spread an old packet of cards face-down across the table top. He told me to pick one, but I declined, demanding to know just what the hell was going on. "This prison cell wasn't here before."
"—here before. Yes, you're arrogant as ever, boy. Now pick a card."
"Not until I get some answers," I said, citing all these insufferable peculiarities as the precursor of my current disposition. I was firm on the matter, adding quite frankly that I had no interest in any of his Balderdash and Chicanery but suffice to say, this impetuous slur did not well assuage anyone's temperament, and when that purple eye of his began to glow angrily, I reconsidered my comportment rather quickly—and picked a card.
"Pick a better one," he said, looking annoyed.
I did so without question, chancing gratefully upon something less insipid.
"The Hanged Man," he stated before revealing it to be so: a stark figure dangling upside-down from a tree, one leg bent to form a cross, hands behind his back. "You see what happens when you don't listen?"
"But I did listen," I said. "You told me to pick a different card."
"No, I warned you to pick a better card."
Just how I was supposed to do that when the cards were face-down, I didn't know. No doubt there were some clandestine markings to be read by the properly initiated, but I'd never been privy to such parlour tricks. Indeed, my father had had little patience for the magi either.
"Yes, and look where that got him," said Yidoni, conveying the message as if from the skull.
"Don't speak of my father," I said.
Grinning yellow teeth, he proceeded to shuffle the cards before laying seven of them face-down in a sort of wheel-and-spoke pattern, one central card with six more surrounding it. Tapping his bony index on the central card—the one which supposedly would represent me—he asked me to intuit its identity, and given that I knew only two cards in the Tarot (who the hell knew more?), you'll appreciate how idiotic I thought the whole affair.
Until, that is, my inkling turned out to be correct, and he once again flipped over The Hanged Man.
"As if you'd have gone anywhere," he chuckled.
I bristled somewhat at his smugness, readying myself to denounce his trick as nothing more than a practiced sleight-of-hand. But on my honour, the longer I stared at the card, the more The Hanged Man took on my form and face.
"How are you doing this?" I asked.
"A foolish question," he said, and proceeded to turn over the remaining six cards, one by one, beginning with a pale face that floated above a dark path. A dog howled and a wolf watched something stir in the water. "The Moon brings deception," he said. "The night illusions from which Madness is not born but lured."
"I'm not mad," I insisted, though it occurred to me then that I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen the sun. Had I really been bereft of its light since my imprisonment? The very notion turned me maudlin. What the hell kind of place was this?
"The Tower," said Yidoni, flipping the next card which depicted a tall, brick built structure being struck by lightning. Fire blazed in its slit windows from which two people had thrown themselves."Do you know what's worse than the worst thing happening to you?" asked Yidoni.
I pondered but couldn't find an answer.
"Deserving it," he said, looking me dead in the eye. His words themselves did not perturb me, for such grim interpretations were to be expected. But with each card revealed my stomach twisted ever more tightly, and when Yidoni chalked it up to the "sickening truth", I bit back rabidly.
"This two-bit charlatanry, isn't fooling me. You're just playing off my facial cues. It's all Barnum statements and panache."
"If you say so," he said before plunging the cell into silence upon the reversal of the fourth card: The Lovers.
I'll bet good money the damn card has never reared itself without a woman in the room, but loathe as I am to admit it, I couldn't help but follow my eyes to Desiree.
She raised an eyebrow, lounging easily against the back wall with her ruby heel tapping lightly on the bricks. "La la," she said.
"And in a reversed position too," hissed Yidoni, indicating the card's orientation along with infinitely more. I rebuked the sordid remark, comparing him to those shameless comedians who seek wit on the toilet floor. But Fate, it seemed, had a filthily sense of humour, and thus did the fifth card reveal itself as The High Priestess: a veiled woman of voluptuous silhouette who sat between black and white pillars, and whose single loose hair-strand was a kind of burnished bronze colour that could've been either blonde like Lydia, or red like Desiree.
"Wisdom shall conquer lust," said Yidoni. "But Solomon you are not, and even two wives shall yet destroy you."
I gritted my teeth. "For god's sake, will you stop talking in riddles!"
"Only when you start learning their meaning."
I was running out of patience. "Just what the hell's the point of all this?"
He answered simply by turning over the sixth card: a trumpet-blowing angel rising above a graveyard whose dead were climbing from their coffins, arms raised to heaven. I couldn't believe my eyes. The image was entirely similar to a painting in my father's collection, one of the most obscure ones whose eldritch composition had exiled it to the attic, and to which the unknown artist had entitled: Judgement.
"This isn't possible," I said, staring at the angel who now bore the face of Dr Wheeler. "It just isn't possible."
"Why?" said Yidoni. "Because you don't understand it? Or because you understand it all too well?" He reached for the final card but I had little doubt what it was, and before Yidoni could flip it completely—just as I saw the tip of a scythe—I snatched the cards from table, shuffling them in haste, and laying seven new cards back on the table.
"Let's try this again," I said, summoning that old bravado of mine in effort to dispel this trickster along with my angst. But to my utter horror, the cards came up the same way, and no matter how many times I repeated the procedure, the outcome did not change. "Well that's a neat bloody trick," I snarked, though my desperation was palpable. Moreover, the twisting in my stomach threatened to rip open my navel.
"A twisted thing cannot be made straight," chided Yidoni—but I'd had enough.
I stood up fast, intending to throw the cursed cards in his tattooed face, until the room suddenly flipped upside down and I found myself dangling from the ceiling by my foot. Fear seized me. I shouted for help but when Desiree approached she took only the liberty of another red kiss.
"Stop it! Please! I want to get out of here!"
"A three ply cord is not really severed," said Yidoni, "but the Hanged Man's noose is accord of his own." His shrill laughter filled the cell, a tone so sharp that I felt my eardrums slice wetly.
Suddenly I dropped.
Crashing to the floor, the impact knocked the wind out of me, but I scrambled to my feet and pushed straight passed Desiree, rushing out of the black cell and hurrying down the corridor, one door, two doors, until I was back in my cell.
"Hello, Isaac," said the Professor.