The scents of the room made my head pound. I hadn’t eaten anything today, I realized; perhaps that was what was making me lightheaded. I sat down across the table from her, in the candlelight.
She extended her hand and took my hand in hers.
She stared at my palm, touched it, softly, with her forefinger.
“Hair?” She was puzzled.
“Yeah, well. I’m on my own a lot.” I grinned. I had hoped it was a friendly grin, but she raised an eyebrow at me anyway.
“When I look at you,” said Madame Ezekiel, “this is what I see. I see the eye of a man. Also I see the eye of a wolf. In the eye of a man I see honesty, decency, innocence. I see an upright man who walks on the square. And in the eye of a wolf I see a groaning and a growling, night howls and cries, I see a monster running with blood-flecked spittle in the darkness of the borders of the town.”
“How can you see a growl or a cry?”
She smiled. “It is not hard,” she said. Her accent was not American. It was Russian, or Maltese, or Egyptian perhaps. “In the eye of the mind we see many things.”
Madame Ezekiel closed her green eyes. She had remarkably long eyelashes; her skin was pale, and her black hair was never still—it drifted gently around her head, in the silks, as if it were floating on distant tides.
“There is a traditional way,” she told me. “A way to wash off a bad shape. You stand in running water, in clear spring water, while eating white rose petals.”
“And then?”
“The shape of darkness will be washed from you.”
“It will return,” I told her, “with the next full of the moon.”
“So,” said Madame Ezekiel, “once the shape is washed from you, you open your veins in the running water. It will sting mightily, of course. But the river will carry the blood away.”
She was dressed in silks, in scarves and cloths of a hundred different colors, each bright and vivid, even in the muted light of the candles.
Her eyes opened.
“Now,” she said, “the tarot.” She unwrapped her deck from the black silk scarf that held it, passed me the cards to shuffle. I fanned them, riffed and bridged them.
“Slower, slower,” she said. “Let them get to know you. Let them love you, like . . . like a woman would love you.”
I held them tightly, then passed them back to her.
She turned over the first card. It was called The Warwolf. It showed darkness and amber eyes, a smile in white and red.
Her green eyes showed confusion. They were the green of emeralds. “This is not a card from my deck,” she said and turned over the next card. “What did you do to my cards?”
“Nothing, ma’am. I just held them. That’s all.”
The card she had turned over was The Deep One. It showed something green and faintly octopoid. The thing’s mouths—if they were indeed mouths and not tentacles—began to writhe on the card as I watched.
She covered it with another card, and then another, and another. The rest of the cards were blank pasteboard.
“Did you do that?” She sounded on the verge of tears.
“No.”
“Go now,” she said.
“But—”
“Go.” She looked down, as if trying to convince herself I no longer existed.
I stood up, in the room that smelled of incense and candlewax, and looked out of her window, across the street. A light flashed briefly in my office window. Two men with flashlights were walking around. They opened the empty filing cabinet, peered around, then took up their positions, one in the armchair, the other behind the door, waiting for me to return. I smiled to myself. It was cold and inhospitable in my office, and with any luck they would wait there for hours until they finally decided I wasn’t coming back.
So I left Madame Ezekiel turning over her cards, one by one, staring at them as if that would make the pictures return; and I went downstairs and walked back down Marsh Street until I reached the bar.
The place was empty now; the barman was smoking a cigarette, which he stubbed out as I came in.
“Where are the chess fiends?”
“It’s a big night for them tonight. They’ll be down at the bay. Let’s see. You’re a Jack Daniel’s? Right?”
“Sounds good.”
He poured it for me. I recognized the thumbprint from the last time I had the glass. I picked up the volume of Tennyson poems from the bar top.
“Good book?”
The fox-haired barman took his book from me, opened it, and read:
“Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth . . .”
I’d finished my drink. “So? What’s your point?”
He walked around the bar, took me over to the window. “See? Out there?”
He pointed toward the west of the town, toward the cliffs. As I stared a bonfire was kindled on the cliff tops; it flared and began to burn with a copper-green flame.
“They’re going to wake the Deep Ones,” said the barman. “The stars and the planets and the moon are all in the right places. It’s time. The dry lands will sink, and the seas shall rise . . .”
“ ‘For the world shall be cleansed with ice and floods, and I’ll thank you to keep to your own shelf in the refrigerator,’ ” I said.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. What’s the quickest way to get up to those cliffs?”
“Back up Marsh Street. Hang a left at the Church of Dagon till you reach Manuxet Way, then just keep on going.” He pulled a coat off the back of the door and put it on. “C’mon. I’ll walk you up there. I’d hate to miss any of the fun.”
“You sure?”
“No one in town’s going to be drinking tonight.” We stepped out, and he locked the door to the bar behind us.
It was chilly in the street, and fallen snow blew about the ground like white mists. From street level,
