Allegories of the Tarot (2 page)

“I don’t want to die.” I wheezed. My pulse thrummed,
running a race it couldn’t win.

The old man laughed. “Oh, Ellen, we’re already dead. Why
not go out in a blaze of glory?”

I yanked the seatbelt over my chest and fumbled beneath
the leather bench for the locking mechanism. Snapping the restraint in place
brought no comfort. I glanced at the speedometer. The needle vibrated just
south of one hundred.

Numb with panic, I hadn’t realized Max jumped onto my
lap until I looked down. Trembling, he stared at me, clearly trying to
determine if I had a solution to the mess of ours. When he seemed to come up
empty, he turned his attention to the driver.

Hunching low, Max growled.

The events following that diminutive—though
predatory—warning happened fast.

Max sprang at the old man, biting and scratching. The
man’s eyes widened as he released the wheel to defend himself, but he was slow
and Max was fast. Sharp canines sank into the man’s neck as we careened off the
road.

The car somersaulted, the world around me spinning.

Then the embrace of darkness.

When I opened my eyes, Max sat in my lap and looked up.
No longer was he trembling. I patted myself, looking for injuries, then pulled
the sun visor down and studied my face in its mirror. Other than a terrible
case of dizziness, I felt fine. I wiggled my fingers. I moved my legs. I rubbed
my stiff neck and groaned. Yeah, I was alive.

Blood trickled from a gash above Max’s brow. Concerned
for his wellbeing, I felt his limbs,
then
pressed two
fingers into his belly. When he didn’t whimper, I assumed he’d live, too.

The same couldn’t be said for the old man.

Jagged lines spiderwebbed across the windshield, and in
the center of that bloody mosaic, the old man hung suspended. The lower half of
his body was still in the car, but his front half draped across the Lincoln’s
blue hood.

I heaved my breakfast onto the floorboard, unsnapped the
seat belt, yanked the door handle,
then
staggered from
the car. With Max at my side, I stood in the deep ditch that stopped our fall,
waiting for balance to find me. After a few baby steps, testing my ability to
walk, I ambled to the driver’s side door and leaned through the window. Doing
my best to ignore all the blood, I reached down and pulled the trunk release.
Sliding on my pack, I trudged up the steep embankment to the highway. Max
followed at my heels.

Short of breath, I stood on the shoulder of the road. I
looked left then right. No cars. A sign staked in the barren earth read, Garretson
3 miles. Max and I started walking.

The afternoon sun blazed, and my mind became as empty as
my stomach. Max’s head hung low as he panted, but he kept pace with me.

A few minutes later, an engine roared behind us. But no
hopeful bark erupted from Max.

Without so much as a glance at the approaching vehicle,
I stopped walking and stuck out my thumb.

Max gazed up at me, titling his head quizzically.

“Don’t worry, boy,” I said. “The next one will be all
right. I promise.”

***

A Pushcart Prize nominee and an active member of the
Horror Writers Association, Peter Giglio is the author of five novels, four
novellas, and he edits a successful line of books for Evil Jester Press. His
works of short fiction can be found in a number of notable volumes, including
two comprehensive genre anthologies edited by New York Times Bestselling author
John Skipp.

***

THE MAGICIAN

The Intern's Story

By Lon Prater

Hansom Haddix nudged the antique pickup’s
three-on-the-tree column shifter back into third. The transmission shrieked
like a circular saw cutting through knotty wood. The big truck shuddered, but
somehow kept right on zooming down the red clay Georgia road. We were on a
mission, the infamous white-haired photographer and I.

I just didn’t know what it was.

“So why this location, Mr. Haddix?”
It was my first day interning for the aged photographer. I wanted him to know
he’d made the right choice, picking me from all the applicants. I hoped no one
from the college had called to let him know I had dropped out soon as I finished
my photography elective.

“Someplace lucky,” he said. “And call me Hansom.”

Hansom won awards and worldwide fame for his body of
work. Many believed he crossed the line from technical skill into Fine Art with
his Faces of the
Fallen
photo essay on homeless vets.
Having just turned eighty-two at the end of 1982, he wasn’t getting any
younger, nor was he expected to do too many more shoots. Which is why I applied
the moment I heard about the chance to spend the summer working with him on his
next project in the boonies of Southwest Georgia.

What I hadn’t expected was to spend the first day of
summer trundling out to a bingo parlor in the boonies with a man so far off his
rocker he made that Pink Floyd movie seem positively sane by comparison.

“Fairies,” he told me for the fifth time, “love to be
around enormous swings of luck. The moment someone’s fortune changes, good or
bad...It’s like candy to them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But they don’t like a lot of flashing lights and fuss,
so you’ll never find one in a casino or a dog track. You have to stay small
time. Au naturel is the only way to catch one.”

I made a face as I considered that.

Hansom’s laugh brayed out like a big horse. It was
jarring to hear that robust laughter pealing out from such a narrow-framed old
man. “Not naked.” He brayed again.
“Just in a natural state.
Do I look crazy enough to go around shooting pictures butt naked?”

I grinned back at him, not as relieved as I’d hoped to
be. “Sure hope not.”

Around dusk, we pulled up in front of the Hoot ‘n’ Holler
Bingo Parlor in a little farming town too small to mention. I kicked as much of
the red dirt as I could from the soles of my shoes and carried the tripod and
other gear inside while Hansom spoke with the staff.

He apparently did not mention fairies to them. That must
have been a special flavor of crazy he was only sharing with me. Had to admit,
other than his weird Tinkerbell fixation, the old guy’s faculties were sharp as
a tack.

“Where do you want me to set up?”

“Back there.” Hansom nodded his head toward the far end
of the parlor. He leaned in close enough that I could smell the Chicklets gum
on his breath.

“Fairies can’t see into corners,” he breathed.

“Of course not, Mister—I mean, Hansom.”

The regulars poured in between six and seven. They
greeted each other with loud, rattling coughs.
Ordered greasy
food from the short order grill in back.
Set up their pink-haired Troll
dolls and colored daubers in meticulous arrangements.

We waited most of the night. There were plenty of missed
shots that would have been fine for any of the human-interest slicks. A palsied
woman with a scarf on her head and her teeth in a glass of water glared at us
over an Olympian selection of thirty-two different bingo sheets.
The jowly caller taking off his cowboy hat and wiping sweat from
his brow on one sleeve.
A black man in patched jeans and a pressed
shirt,
disappointed that he didn’t have a good bingo after
all.

Not Eisenstaedt’s photos of V-J Day in Times Square or
Sophia Loren, but solid stuff, real humanity distilled onto film. Hansom Haddix
wanted none of that.

Bored, I wandered to the snack bar and got a bottle of
Coke and a MoonPie. I really didn’t have the money for either. My ex-girlfriend
had wiped out my account to pay my share of the overdue rent and then dumped me.
(All of which had been about four hours after I told her I’d dropped out of
college to pursue my dream of being a photographer. You’re giving up a
marketing scholarship for THAT? I never got a chance to answer.)

I walked back to the corner, realizing for the first
time that marshmallow could actually go stale. As I approached, a woman rasped
out “BINGO!” like it was her last breath.

Hansom thumbed the shutter release button.

He only shot one roll of film that night, just winners
and losers. No flash at all. Contrary to his usual habit, he took a single
picture of a scene before moving on to the next composition. “After each shot,
they hide. You have to be real particular and give them plenty of time to
forget you’re there before you take the next picture.”

“Hmm.”
I was too young and
maybe too worried for his sanity to engage him on this.

Around eleven that night, we piled into the Chevy and
rode back to the motel we’d set up in. We drove under streetlights that had
been shot out, past boarded-up stores and three different First Baptist
churches, a slaughterhouse and a Rexall drugstore advertising two-for-one paper
towels.

We’d rented two adjoining rooms. One of them we rigged
into a darkroom. Soon as we were inside, Hansom made sure the heavy black
fabric he’d stapled along the window frame and over the doors was still intact
and lightproof.

Meanwhile, I got the temperatures right by floating the
gallon jugs of developer, stop bath, fixer, and clearer in a tub full
of 68
⁰
water
. He came over to watch my work long
enough to be sure I did things correctly.

I asked him again why we weren’t going to make any
prints.

He dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand. “No
point.”

“Then why did we take the pictures in the first place?”

“Make prints later if you want. What’s important to see
is only on the negative.”

Like so many of the things Hansom had told me today,
this made no sense at all. I let it go.

Hansom took a quick inventory of where things were in
the room and switched off the light. I waited, smelling the vinegar stink of
the stop bath, feeling for the scissors and timer I’d placed on the motel’s
bureau.

He had me withdraw the film, cut it, spool it onto the
reel, and put a lid on the developer tank. The lights blazed back on and we
both stood there blinking while I agitated the developer bath. Hansom kept
track of the time.

“All the fancy new equipment we could be using, and we
might as well be making daguerreotypes. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“Sir?”

“I’ve seen the way you’ve reacted today. You think the
old man’s gone batty, don’t you?”

“Not at all, I—“

“Say it!”

“I’m glad to be here, I’m not going to question your—“

“Stop.”

I stopped.

“The stop bath, I mean.” His voice held an edge now. A
desperate tone had crept into his words.
Something impatient and
very close to manic.
I hurried to obey.

Hansom didn’t speak another word until we’d finished
with the fixer, clearer, and distilled water wash. He snatched the strip of
film from me before I could hang it up to dry.

“I started seeing them in my Las Vegas shoots,” he said,
inserting the still damp filmstrip hurriedly into the projector. His wrinkled
hands, so steady on the shutter release just hours before, shook like the
palsied bingo lady’s had. “They waited in big packs, tribes almost, in the dark
corners outside the casinos, attracted to all the fortunes being won and lost,
but repelled by all the noise and neon.”

He pointed the projector at the wall and turned it on. I
said nothing. “Get the lights.”

I stood there blinking in confusion and dismay for a
split-second, then swiped my hand over the light switch.

Hansom waited til I was looking directly into his rheumy
eyes. “When you first see them, you have to allow your eyes to commit
immediately, or your brain never will. If you don’t see them on the very first
glance—if you blink instead—then you never will. Understand?”

I nodded, but it was a lie.

Hansom slid the film into the projector and hurriedly
focused the image on the wall. He grunted.
“None in this one.”

He went through three more then stopped.

A man wearing a “Disco is Dead” t-shirt who’d won
$200.00 for a Cover-All materialized on the wall in all his magnified,
negative-image, toothy glory. The shutter had caught him in mid-jump. Hansom
jerked a finger at the projected image. “See there!
Just
behind his right shoulder?”

I’d become pretty good at converting negative images to
positives in my mind. Most photographers get the hang of it eventually. Even
so, I couldn’t be sure what I saw. It might have been a tiny face, dragonfly
eyes and slits for a nose. There might have been some out-of-focus bit of
background there that resembled a scaly wing and limber little arm.

There might have been, but I didn’t have time to decide.
It could have just as easily been water spots from not letting the film dry.

Hansom advanced the strip of film quickly through
several more frames until coming to a stop on the image of a thoroughly
depressed-looking woman who had missed a big pot by one number. Cigarette smoke
wreathed around her face like a surreal picture frame. He scanned the blown up
negative and shouted, “There!”

I looked where he was pointing. It could have been a
black butterfly wing by her earlobe, but it could have just as easily been part
of her earring, too.

The old man moved the film again and again, grunting
mostly, but occasionally pointing at things too fast for me to really keep up
with him. When he reached the last image, he rushed up to the wall and pounded
on it with one angry, shaking fist. “Do you see them? Five in one shot! Five!”

It was a picture of me, coming back from the rest room
near the end of the night. I had talked to someone in there, the older black
man in the patched jeans and pressed shirt.