The Fool - Chapter IV
December 20th 2006 00:24
He sweeps the curtain aside. Beyond is a small room, dark and murky bar a few homemade candles stuck at seemingly random spots across the room. It is plain but for a few cluttered shelves along the walls, crammed with books and strange ornaments. Three or four stick of incense burn, distributed around the shelves and the floor, and it's these sticks of incense that are giving off that thick, strangely relaxing smoke.
In the centre is a round table. Behind it sits a woman in a shawl. Vincent's eyes are very good, but even from a couple of yards away he is having trouble distinguishing her features. Something odd is happening with the candlelight. But he thinks she is wearing a small smile.
“Hello,” he says slowly, awkwardly, feeling that smoke laying a pleasant layer of fog across his senses. He squints at her face, but it seems to be changing. With every flicker of the candles her features seem to change – one moment she looks ancient, seventy, eighty years old. In the next she looks like a beautiful young woman, a teenager, just a little girl.
“Hello, stranger,” she replies conversationally, gesturing to the empty chair across from her. Her voice is low, sultry, a light Spanish accent. “Sit. Have you had your cards read before?”
It's just a formality. She knows it's his first time. But he nods as he makes his way uncertainly toward the chair. He grips the back with one hand and drops himself into it. He still can't get a clear view of her face, from right across the table. It's not the features themselves that seem to change but just her age, many times a second. It makes his head ache.
She's already looking down at a pack of cards, seemingly pulled from nowhere, which she shuffles lightning-fast with long-fingernailed hands. He watches this, both of them sitting in silence, becoming transfixed on that impossibly fluid movement as the cards flicker in and out and through the pack. He blinks. Her hands are like two machines. The cards are whipping in and out in a constant infinity-loop. He blinks again. Her hands don't seem to be moving. The cards are a blur, a fluid white halo.
Suddenly she stops, slapping the pack down on the table in front of her with a loud snap that jerks him out of his reverie. Startled, he looks at her face. She's picked up the pack and
is offering it to him, that smile on her red lips.
He's still not sure, but he thinks she's an old woman. Christ, what is she burning in here? It's like the tendrils of smoke are weaving silvery spiderwebs across his consciousness, dulling, calming, intoxicating.
“Take one,” she says softly. “Place it facedown on the table without looking at it.”
He reachers out and slides a card from her hands. As he places it facedown on the table, he looks up into her eyes, straight into the little black pools of her pupils, and gets a weird feeling of vertigo – like he's just looked off the top of some titanic cliff-face. Those eyes look so deep, somehow; he can see a tiny vision of himself refracted from their glassy depths, reaching toward the outstretched cards. He doesn't want to look away. He is aware of her smiling, and those soft red lips parting to whisper, take another.
He blinks, hard, forcing himself to look down and take another card. His fingers have picked up a minute tremble, and he blinks again. He looks back into her eyes as he puts the card down; he must be imagining things, but the room's light seems to glow dimmer as the card hits the table.
Another. The sultry whisper seems to come from inside his head. He's getting a weird feeling looking into her eyes. It seems like he becomes less aware of everything else in his peripheral vision, like a television screen where the colour and brightness of everything but those two eyes is slowly being turned down. He feels his hand reach for another card, noting vaguely that he's feeling a little sluggish. When he places the card on the table, it seems to cause a deep, low, resonating boom somewhere far away.
Another.
With some deep reservoir of his remarkable force of will, he forces himself to look away from her eyes again to take the card. At first, he is reminded of moving underwater, like the air has thickened. His fingers touch the card and slide it easily from the pack, and the feeling passes. He feels her smile on him and feels a dark flicker of doubt at the back of his mind.
I'm starting to feel...a little weird, he thinks, and wonders if there is some foul play afoot. He looks back at her eyes and places the final card on the table between them. He feels drawn away again, as though the rest of the world was fading. He wants to make some flippant remark about the odd smell of the incense, but it seems that his everlasting sense of humour has deserted him for the nonce.
“What are you...” he says, his voice a slinky bass rumble, deeper than he remembers. He trails off slowly, the last word sinking like a long low sigh, gently out of existence, followed by nothing, a deep silence which gently slides over his words, overtaking them effortlessly. He knows he was going to ask her a question, but he gets distracted by the ambient rumbling of his voice coming up his throat and resonating in his head. What are you...what?
He frowns, puzzled, wondering what he was going to ask, and why he has never noticed before the eerie way his voice echoes in his own ears. Embarrassed, he decides to keep quiet. Lola is gazing down at the table, at the four cards. Her face in the flickering light is a puzzle with pieces missing. He looks down, too, as she gently flips the first card onto its back.
“Aaaaaah,” she says, her voice one of sultry rapture. To him, the sound is like a long, low moan of sexual ecstasy, of hinting at sublime pleasures beyond the understanding of most men. With distant alarm, he feels himself beginning to grow hard beneath his belt.
She taps the card with a long fingernail, altering the course of his thoughts at least temporarily.
It shows a blonde man wearing sunglasses and a black suit. He has a rifle over one shoulder and he appears to be about to about to step off a cliff. Across the top of the card, it says: 0 – THE FOOL.
“The Fool,” Lola says emphatically. “That is you.”
He gazes down at the card. “Thanks a lot.” The card looks to be flickering, changing, in the light, like her face. He almost swears he can see the man moving, walking, stepping over the cliff edge, in a herky-jerky little animation, and sometimes he is sure that the man's face is his own.
“The Fool is as the newborn. He is not stupid as such, but he is naiive, ignorant, about to enter the world but unaware of its dangers...hence, the careless step over the edge.”
“Ah.”
“He looks forward and sees endless time and possibility, and faces the knowledge that his coming experiences will surely change him forever. People don't get the Fool for their first card very often. It means you are entering a period of great change, of turmoil...in your lifestyle, perhaps; or something will cause you to become introspective. You may find yourself looking inwards and asking yourself who you are.”
He shakes his head, briefly experiencing that odd, syrupy, underwater sensation of movement again. “I doubt it.”
“Well, perhaps you will be surprised.” Lola turns over another card. Vincent's eyes are watering. He rubs them with his fists and notices that his head is starting to swim pleasantly, the things he can see moving as though they are underwater...the air pushing back with a gentle resistance, like everything in the room is just floating a little, in a softened gravity, gently waving to and fro with the ebb and flow of small currents. The deep shadows in the room shift and flicker in a manner that disturbs him. His legs feel very long and light, his feet pleasantly distant from his body.
He rolls his gaze back down to the table as she turns over the next card. He squints down at it. It seems to show a chariot, pulled by two huge black three-headed dogs with red eyes. Standing, wild-haired and brandishing a cruelly barbed whip to the heavens, is a soldier in green. His clothes are torn and ragged, and he bleeds from countless wounds. His eyes are wild, and as red as the dogs', which Vincent finally recognise as Cerebus, the watchdog at the gates of hell. But the card is upside down – facing Lola instead of Vincent.
“Aaahh,” Lola whispers again.
“What is it?” Vincent cannot take his eyes from the dancing flames in the eyes of the soldier. He fancies he can see the wheels of the chariot turning, the soldier's maniacal leer screaming something he cannot hear.
The Chariot, Lola whispers, seemingly speaking inside his skull, through his own thoughts. A card meaning war, conquest. A battle that can be won, if your will is strong enough. It stands for courage, willpower, strength of body, strength of mind.
Vincent sees that the soldier's dogtags hang around his neck on a chain which is snapping, frozen in that one instant, to fall beneath the chariot and lost forever, and that the face of the soldier is also his own.
However...
His eyelids droop, rolling slowly closed around the front of his eyes, meet, shutter, halfway, and roll back again. They seem to weigh more than he remembers, but it's not an unpleasant feeling. It had never occurred to him how perfectly those two folds of skin could mold around the curve of your eyes, just as easy as you please. He pushes the esoteric thought away and looks her in the face again.
Oh, his aching eyes. Oh, those little black pools that reach back to eternity.
However, she whispers, and Vincent can see only her full red lips purse to form the words. The card is upside down. It means that you are in danger of losing the battle, because of a lack of control. The future is always in flux. The outcome of your battle is not yet decided.
He barely nods, all of a sudden feeling that his head is full of wet sand.
The lips break into a secretive smile. And some say that the card means a journey. It means getting into your car and driving away. Which it is for you, I cannot say.
His gaze flickers to her eyes and sees the crow's feet around them, the eyes of an old woman.
He doesn't want to look at her anymore, so he looks at the third card as she turns it over.
He has known, on a few occasions in his long life, what some anonymous person meant in times long past when they coined the phrase “that sinking feeling”. You feel like a shell of a man, all the contents of your physical body – brains, bones, guts and muscle – liquify into some thick runny mire and drain down through your body, out the soles of your feet. You feel it in the gut the strongest – a plummeting feeling like falling into space. He feels it again now, for the first time in a long time, as she turns the next card over to show the Hanged Man.
A dead tree stands against a blood-red moon. A man is tied to it, upside down, in an inverted Jesus Christ crucifixion pose. His arms are bound to the lower branches with thick tangles of razor wire, and his feet are pinned to the trunk with long industrial nails. Blood coats his body in black, dripping rivulets, filling his eyes and mouth, creating a spreading stain on the dirt below. But incredibly, his facial expression is one of serenity, placidity, contemplation – or a deep trance.
The Hanged Man, Lola breathes.
He suddenly realises his heart sounds impossibly loud, beating like a doomsday drum in his ears.
What does it mean? He is certain he only thinks this, but she seems to hear. She is young, he sees; how could have he ever thought otherwise? She sits before him clear as day, until the next flicker of the candle again plunges him into uncertainty.
It can mean sacrifice. Her tone seems more contemplative, though she still wears her small smile. As with Osiris, Odin and Jesus Christ, all varying myths with one recurring theme. The man's inversion on the cross can also mean too much independence, a stubborn isolation that places the man at risk. Beware your selfishness in the future, Vincent.
He can't remember telling her his name. But on the whole, he can't remember much. The candles around the room have gone out, and everything he can see is plunged into an unearthly gloom, like the black in the centre of her eyes – an endless abyss of pure obsidian that no light can penetrate. But a flickering light is still coming from somewhere, and with it he can see Lola, the table, the cards, his hands, nothing more. Delicate tendrils of smoke drift across his vision. He can hear a sound so low he has not noticed it and can not tell when it began. It's like a droning, atonal chant from somewhere deep inside a cave, twisted and echoed and layered until it becomes a demonic choir.
His eyes bleary, blinking through the haze. He looks down and she turns over a card that says JUDGEMENT and he suddenly knows in one moment of sudden certainty that every fear and nightmare he has ever had is real and true and rushing toward him even now, lying in wait, creeping from the deepest blackest cracks of his mind and growing into a twisted sort of half-life. His every sin is piled atop him, sitting on one side of a scale tipping hopelessly toward oblivion, he's drowning in it, and he's falling over the edge.
The card depicts a rotting corpse with skeletal angel wings growing from its back. As Vincent watches, it raises an ancient-looking bugle to its grinning, lipless mouth and blows. From the grey and barren wasteland below it, the earth splits and crumbles and more corpses begin to climb from the dirt, reaching pathetically upward into the beam of unearthly light that suddenly pierces from the sky.
Vincent can't watch anymore. He shuts his eyes, feeling like he is floating in an abyss, with that low demonic choir building toward some unearthly, damning crescendo. Now he can heare a million voices in it, screaming and chanting and laughing in the dark.
Judgement, Lola whispers, the sweetly soothing tones of a succubus, temptress, seducer, destroyer. You will be judged. Or you will judge others. Or, perhaps...
The last word stretches out, fades, blurs into the echoes in the cacophony around him.
...both.
He wrenches his eyes open and looks at her. Her face is completely hidden by the shadow cast by the overhang of her shawl, and way back in the darkness he can see the light reflecting from two glassy black holes, motes of light dancing on inky black beads somewhere. The choir is now a roar, an inarticulate screaming bloody white noise that shakes his bones and rattles his teeth.
Death, Lola whispers.
Silence.
In the centre is a round table. Behind it sits a woman in a shawl. Vincent's eyes are very good, but even from a couple of yards away he is having trouble distinguishing her features. Something odd is happening with the candlelight. But he thinks she is wearing a small smile.
“Hello,” he says slowly, awkwardly, feeling that smoke laying a pleasant layer of fog across his senses. He squints at her face, but it seems to be changing. With every flicker of the candles her features seem to change – one moment she looks ancient, seventy, eighty years old. In the next she looks like a beautiful young woman, a teenager, just a little girl.
“Hello, stranger,” she replies conversationally, gesturing to the empty chair across from her. Her voice is low, sultry, a light Spanish accent. “Sit. Have you had your cards read before?”
It's just a formality. She knows it's his first time. But he nods as he makes his way uncertainly toward the chair. He grips the back with one hand and drops himself into it. He still can't get a clear view of her face, from right across the table. It's not the features themselves that seem to change but just her age, many times a second. It makes his head ache.
She's already looking down at a pack of cards, seemingly pulled from nowhere, which she shuffles lightning-fast with long-fingernailed hands. He watches this, both of them sitting in silence, becoming transfixed on that impossibly fluid movement as the cards flicker in and out and through the pack. He blinks. Her hands are like two machines. The cards are whipping in and out in a constant infinity-loop. He blinks again. Her hands don't seem to be moving. The cards are a blur, a fluid white halo.
Suddenly she stops, slapping the pack down on the table in front of her with a loud snap that jerks him out of his reverie. Startled, he looks at her face. She's picked up the pack and
is offering it to him, that smile on her red lips.
He's still not sure, but he thinks she's an old woman. Christ, what is she burning in here? It's like the tendrils of smoke are weaving silvery spiderwebs across his consciousness, dulling, calming, intoxicating.
“Take one,” she says softly. “Place it facedown on the table without looking at it.”
He reachers out and slides a card from her hands. As he places it facedown on the table, he looks up into her eyes, straight into the little black pools of her pupils, and gets a weird feeling of vertigo – like he's just looked off the top of some titanic cliff-face. Those eyes look so deep, somehow; he can see a tiny vision of himself refracted from their glassy depths, reaching toward the outstretched cards. He doesn't want to look away. He is aware of her smiling, and those soft red lips parting to whisper, take another.
He blinks, hard, forcing himself to look down and take another card. His fingers have picked up a minute tremble, and he blinks again. He looks back into her eyes as he puts the card down; he must be imagining things, but the room's light seems to glow dimmer as the card hits the table.
Another. The sultry whisper seems to come from inside his head. He's getting a weird feeling looking into her eyes. It seems like he becomes less aware of everything else in his peripheral vision, like a television screen where the colour and brightness of everything but those two eyes is slowly being turned down. He feels his hand reach for another card, noting vaguely that he's feeling a little sluggish. When he places the card on the table, it seems to cause a deep, low, resonating boom somewhere far away.
Another.
With some deep reservoir of his remarkable force of will, he forces himself to look away from her eyes again to take the card. At first, he is reminded of moving underwater, like the air has thickened. His fingers touch the card and slide it easily from the pack, and the feeling passes. He feels her smile on him and feels a dark flicker of doubt at the back of his mind.
I'm starting to feel...a little weird, he thinks, and wonders if there is some foul play afoot. He looks back at her eyes and places the final card on the table between them. He feels drawn away again, as though the rest of the world was fading. He wants to make some flippant remark about the odd smell of the incense, but it seems that his everlasting sense of humour has deserted him for the nonce.
“What are you...” he says, his voice a slinky bass rumble, deeper than he remembers. He trails off slowly, the last word sinking like a long low sigh, gently out of existence, followed by nothing, a deep silence which gently slides over his words, overtaking them effortlessly. He knows he was going to ask her a question, but he gets distracted by the ambient rumbling of his voice coming up his throat and resonating in his head. What are you...what?
He frowns, puzzled, wondering what he was going to ask, and why he has never noticed before the eerie way his voice echoes in his own ears. Embarrassed, he decides to keep quiet. Lola is gazing down at the table, at the four cards. Her face in the flickering light is a puzzle with pieces missing. He looks down, too, as she gently flips the first card onto its back.
“Aaaaaah,” she says, her voice one of sultry rapture. To him, the sound is like a long, low moan of sexual ecstasy, of hinting at sublime pleasures beyond the understanding of most men. With distant alarm, he feels himself beginning to grow hard beneath his belt.
She taps the card with a long fingernail, altering the course of his thoughts at least temporarily.
It shows a blonde man wearing sunglasses and a black suit. He has a rifle over one shoulder and he appears to be about to about to step off a cliff. Across the top of the card, it says: 0 – THE FOOL.
“The Fool,” Lola says emphatically. “That is you.”
He gazes down at the card. “Thanks a lot.” The card looks to be flickering, changing, in the light, like her face. He almost swears he can see the man moving, walking, stepping over the cliff edge, in a herky-jerky little animation, and sometimes he is sure that the man's face is his own.
“The Fool is as the newborn. He is not stupid as such, but he is naiive, ignorant, about to enter the world but unaware of its dangers...hence, the careless step over the edge.”
“Ah.”
“He looks forward and sees endless time and possibility, and faces the knowledge that his coming experiences will surely change him forever. People don't get the Fool for their first card very often. It means you are entering a period of great change, of turmoil...in your lifestyle, perhaps; or something will cause you to become introspective. You may find yourself looking inwards and asking yourself who you are.”
He shakes his head, briefly experiencing that odd, syrupy, underwater sensation of movement again. “I doubt it.”
“Well, perhaps you will be surprised.” Lola turns over another card. Vincent's eyes are watering. He rubs them with his fists and notices that his head is starting to swim pleasantly, the things he can see moving as though they are underwater...the air pushing back with a gentle resistance, like everything in the room is just floating a little, in a softened gravity, gently waving to and fro with the ebb and flow of small currents. The deep shadows in the room shift and flicker in a manner that disturbs him. His legs feel very long and light, his feet pleasantly distant from his body.
He rolls his gaze back down to the table as she turns over the next card. He squints down at it. It seems to show a chariot, pulled by two huge black three-headed dogs with red eyes. Standing, wild-haired and brandishing a cruelly barbed whip to the heavens, is a soldier in green. His clothes are torn and ragged, and he bleeds from countless wounds. His eyes are wild, and as red as the dogs', which Vincent finally recognise as Cerebus, the watchdog at the gates of hell. But the card is upside down – facing Lola instead of Vincent.
“Aaahh,” Lola whispers again.
“What is it?” Vincent cannot take his eyes from the dancing flames in the eyes of the soldier. He fancies he can see the wheels of the chariot turning, the soldier's maniacal leer screaming something he cannot hear.
The Chariot, Lola whispers, seemingly speaking inside his skull, through his own thoughts. A card meaning war, conquest. A battle that can be won, if your will is strong enough. It stands for courage, willpower, strength of body, strength of mind.
Vincent sees that the soldier's dogtags hang around his neck on a chain which is snapping, frozen in that one instant, to fall beneath the chariot and lost forever, and that the face of the soldier is also his own.
However...
His eyelids droop, rolling slowly closed around the front of his eyes, meet, shutter, halfway, and roll back again. They seem to weigh more than he remembers, but it's not an unpleasant feeling. It had never occurred to him how perfectly those two folds of skin could mold around the curve of your eyes, just as easy as you please. He pushes the esoteric thought away and looks her in the face again.
Oh, his aching eyes. Oh, those little black pools that reach back to eternity.
However, she whispers, and Vincent can see only her full red lips purse to form the words. The card is upside down. It means that you are in danger of losing the battle, because of a lack of control. The future is always in flux. The outcome of your battle is not yet decided.
He barely nods, all of a sudden feeling that his head is full of wet sand.
The lips break into a secretive smile. And some say that the card means a journey. It means getting into your car and driving away. Which it is for you, I cannot say.
His gaze flickers to her eyes and sees the crow's feet around them, the eyes of an old woman.
He doesn't want to look at her anymore, so he looks at the third card as she turns it over.
He has known, on a few occasions in his long life, what some anonymous person meant in times long past when they coined the phrase “that sinking feeling”. You feel like a shell of a man, all the contents of your physical body – brains, bones, guts and muscle – liquify into some thick runny mire and drain down through your body, out the soles of your feet. You feel it in the gut the strongest – a plummeting feeling like falling into space. He feels it again now, for the first time in a long time, as she turns the next card over to show the Hanged Man.
A dead tree stands against a blood-red moon. A man is tied to it, upside down, in an inverted Jesus Christ crucifixion pose. His arms are bound to the lower branches with thick tangles of razor wire, and his feet are pinned to the trunk with long industrial nails. Blood coats his body in black, dripping rivulets, filling his eyes and mouth, creating a spreading stain on the dirt below. But incredibly, his facial expression is one of serenity, placidity, contemplation – or a deep trance.
The Hanged Man, Lola breathes.
He suddenly realises his heart sounds impossibly loud, beating like a doomsday drum in his ears.
What does it mean? He is certain he only thinks this, but she seems to hear. She is young, he sees; how could have he ever thought otherwise? She sits before him clear as day, until the next flicker of the candle again plunges him into uncertainty.
It can mean sacrifice. Her tone seems more contemplative, though she still wears her small smile. As with Osiris, Odin and Jesus Christ, all varying myths with one recurring theme. The man's inversion on the cross can also mean too much independence, a stubborn isolation that places the man at risk. Beware your selfishness in the future, Vincent.
He can't remember telling her his name. But on the whole, he can't remember much. The candles around the room have gone out, and everything he can see is plunged into an unearthly gloom, like the black in the centre of her eyes – an endless abyss of pure obsidian that no light can penetrate. But a flickering light is still coming from somewhere, and with it he can see Lola, the table, the cards, his hands, nothing more. Delicate tendrils of smoke drift across his vision. He can hear a sound so low he has not noticed it and can not tell when it began. It's like a droning, atonal chant from somewhere deep inside a cave, twisted and echoed and layered until it becomes a demonic choir.
His eyes bleary, blinking through the haze. He looks down and she turns over a card that says JUDGEMENT and he suddenly knows in one moment of sudden certainty that every fear and nightmare he has ever had is real and true and rushing toward him even now, lying in wait, creeping from the deepest blackest cracks of his mind and growing into a twisted sort of half-life. His every sin is piled atop him, sitting on one side of a scale tipping hopelessly toward oblivion, he's drowning in it, and he's falling over the edge.
The card depicts a rotting corpse with skeletal angel wings growing from its back. As Vincent watches, it raises an ancient-looking bugle to its grinning, lipless mouth and blows. From the grey and barren wasteland below it, the earth splits and crumbles and more corpses begin to climb from the dirt, reaching pathetically upward into the beam of unearthly light that suddenly pierces from the sky.
Vincent can't watch anymore. He shuts his eyes, feeling like he is floating in an abyss, with that low demonic choir building toward some unearthly, damning crescendo. Now he can heare a million voices in it, screaming and chanting and laughing in the dark.
Judgement, Lola whispers, the sweetly soothing tones of a succubus, temptress, seducer, destroyer. You will be judged. Or you will judge others. Or, perhaps...
The last word stretches out, fades, blurs into the echoes in the cacophony around him.
...both.
He wrenches his eyes open and looks at her. Her face is completely hidden by the shadow cast by the overhang of her shawl, and way back in the darkness he can see the light reflecting from two glassy black holes, motes of light dancing on inky black beads somewhere. The choir is now a roar, an inarticulate screaming bloody white noise that shakes his bones and rattles his teeth.
Death, Lola whispers.
Silence.
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