Arcana

Five

Midnight show, admission one.

Brishen gazed at the slip in his hand, then looked up, past the old yew to where the towers and gables of the monastery made a silhouette against the lesser black. He crumpled the paper and slid it back into his pocket, hardly registering its message. Should he climb the terrace and creep back to his room?  It was well past ten by now, and still he could not bring himself to enter those beloved halls.

He tried again, only to turn on his heel as soon as he'd left the moon-splashed shadow of the oaks. He could handle the brothers' reproach because he'd earned it, but what was waiting for him, truly?  He would simply cause more pain to those that loved him best. For how could they protect him from himself? And without the knowledge of what he was, what sort of life could he expect? Maybe it was better if all were spared.

But where could he go?

He thought of his tarot cards, still wrapped in a scrap of silk within his chest of treasures. For the first time in his life, the thought brought no comfort, and Brishen felt another pang of loss. The last, slender cord that had bound him to his origin and his people, to the promise of self knowledge – even that had snapped. He flashed on the fortune teller's dark eyes. What had she said? That if he tried to wield what he could not grasp, he would only hurt himself? But it was a trap, because either way he was dangerous -- to himself, or worse, to others. His powers would not wait, no matter what some two-bit gypsy counseled.

 His gaze wandered down to his hand. Somehow, the slip of paper was there again; he was smoothing it with his thumb. He looked at the message, this time pondering the words. What kind of a show was staged at midnight, when the carnival closed at ten? Had this been given with his ticket at the front booth? He didn't think so. And there was something about the slip itself -- an iridescence as he turned it to the brightness of the harvest moon. He could almost feel energy humming along its length.

The slip wanted him to go.

His body chose what his heart could not. He turned and strode back the way he'd come, past the Grange, its windows like blank eyes, past neat, dark farmhouses where farmers snored beside their farmer wives, over Pearson's hill and to the very edge of the carnival grounds. Only then did he stop to think again.

It occurred to him that he hadn't felt the surge of his special energies since he'd left the gypsy's tent. Even when he'd bumbled that conversation with Katie and – what was his name? Abe, that was it. Even then, he'd felt only like an ordinary idiot. Had all the crises of the day spent his passions, leaving him empty?  Was he just tired out?

Or was it the carnival? Was it helping him, changing him?

For Brishen knew suddenly that he'd been called. Wasn't that why he had come in the first place? He'd heard the call but had misunderstood it. Of course he hadn't been meant to wander the bright, grass-trampled lanes among the living, those simple, hearty folk that belonged to the tilled earth, the fields of wheat and grass. He was meant to come in darkness, like the flag that rippled above the sleeping carnival grounds, blacker even than the moonlit sky. He was meant to come alone.

He ducked under the cord and passed down the empty midway, its once bright scenes made strange by night shadows. Booths were shuttered; tent flaps strained against their tethers. A breeze rustled through the dry grass and billowed the canvas, and like a door opening, the silence deepened.  Or was it only Brishen's imagination?  Sounds, inside the silence -- the scuffling of a field mouse in its hole, pupae struggling against their cocoons, an unseen world as vast as the galaxies in his mind's eye. He felt a quickening, the desire to know. And then, another sound – music, low and throbbing and out of tune, like a calliope that had run down.