Dark Oracle (2 page)
Hesitating, she touched the picture. She held it at arm’s length, reluctant to allow the image to creep too far into her head. Lowell Magnusson stared back at her. He was wearing a truly awful navy blue tie patterned with cartoon planets, comets, and stars. It was the kind of tie one would receive as a gift for Father’s Day. No one would ever pick a tie like that out for himself.
Tentatively, she flipped open the folder.
The file didn’t belong to Delphi’s Daughters. As far as Tara knew, the secret society didn’t keep files. They were dreadfully old-fashioned that way. Rather, they seemed to gather information volunteered from unusual places. Judging by the form titles and letterhead, this file had come from the State Department. The Daughters of Delphi had money, stashed in accounts around the world. Old money. And money could buy a tremendous amount of information and influence.
Lowell Magnusson, age fifty-three, was a quantum physicist on contract for the Department of Defense. He was currently on sabbatical from teaching at Cornell. Tenured. Nice gig. Divorced, with a daughter, Cassie, age twenty-three. He’d been cited by the city of Albany twice for failure to mow his lawn, and his vanity license plates read
quarky
. He’d been raised in a small town in Ohio, which had named a reading room in the county library after him. Neither of his parents was still living, and he had no siblings.
His interest in astronomy had begun when he was twenty-one. As a graduate physics student working as a research assistant at Ohio State University, Magnusson had the good fortune to be present when his mentor, Dr. Jerry Ehman, received the famous Wow! radio signal. Ehman and Magnusson had been involved in the SETI project at the Big Ear Radio Telescope at Ohio State University in 1977, when the Big Ear caught a seventy-two-second burst of odd radio wave activity. The signal strongly suggested the existence of extraterrestrial life. It had never been replicated.
Tara flipped through a series of ID badge photos of the subject. Magnusson took a bad ID photo. He was squinting in half of the shots. His driver’s license also displayed the same blink reflex. She paused at a picture of him standing with a young woman who Tara assumed to be his daughter. They stood together in front of a string of lush green mountains, smiling under a bright blue sky. Magnusson was wearing a lurid yellow floral Hawaiian shirt that showed off a spectacular case of blistering sunburn. His daughter stood with her arms behind her back. She was her father’s daughter: dark hair, lanky frame, with her dad’s deep blue eyes. In the background stood the white dome of a large telescope facility. Hawaii, Tara guessed.
She thumbed through the file, reading paragraphs at random. Several papers Magnusson had written were included, and she read abstracts of articles dealing with the theoretical properties of dark matter and dark energy, describing neutralinos and super-dense particles, gravity wells and the bending of light around unseen objects in space. Magnusson was fascinated by the big cosmological questions of the universe: If only thirty percent of the universe was made of conventional matter and energy—things that could be touched and measured—where was the rest? How can we detect this so-called dark matter and dark energy, which is virtually undetectable?
Tara closed the folder on Magnusson’s questions, leaving out the picture of the physicist and his daughter. She was certain Sophia had included it to tug at her emotions.
Beside it, Oscar snored softly.
Tara pushed away from the table, padded to the bedroom. The gray light of dawn lightened the windows, casting a soft glow over the worn quilt covered in a frost of cat hair. She stood before the dresser, bare except for a closed jewelry box and a framed photograph of her mother and her when Tara was a child. Her mother, dressed in a paisley dress and straw hat, dark hair flowing over her shoulder, had flung her arms around Tara. Her smile was broad as a bow, unself-conscious. Tara was barefoot, wearing a yellow dress embroidered with ducks her mother made for her. Sunlight shone through tree leaves. Tara gently held a salamander in her dirty hands, joyously displaying the newly captured creature to the camera.
Out of the corner of her eye, Tara glimpsed her reflection in the photo frame’s glass. There was no mirror above the dresser or anywhere else in the cabin; Tara had removed all those when she’d moved in. The indistinct image illumined by the dim light of dawn showed the resemblance to her mother. Blue eyes, chocolate hair, skin pale as porcelain. But a truer looking glass or even turning on the light would reveal where the similarities ended: with the scars on her throat, the dark circles under her eyes—the haunted look that never completely left her visage. For a moment, she fingered a raised scar on her collarbone, then let her hand fall. She was not her mother’s daughter, after all. Her mother’s daughter would not be so reluctant to follow in her maternal footsteps.
Tara knelt to open the bottom drawer of the dresser, a drawer that had remained firmly closed for a very long time. She withdrew a small bundle wrapped in a red silk scarf. It had been her mother’s scarf. It still smelled a bit like her, jasmine and orange, fragrances that seemed out of place in this dull gray season. The bundle felt weighty in her hands as she carried it back to the kitchen. She spread the embroidered cloth open on the kitchen table, smoothing the fringe out.
A deck of Tarot cards and a small brown leather notebook lay on the table. The notebook had most of the pages torn out of it; the few remaining leaves were blank. The cards were well-worn with use, small nicks marring the art on the back of the cards: a tree, outlined in gold, branches reaching toward a night sky and roots reaching into the black earth. The black had faded with time. Tara had never really known the provenance of this particular deck. As much as her mother had tried to encourage her to find an affinity with another deck as a child, Tara had latched on to this particular one. It had belonged to her mother but, along with several other decks in her possession, wasn’t the one she used daily. Tara had suspected the cards were much older than her mother. She’d never seen another deck like it. The cards had spoken to her the first time she touched them, seeming to warm to her hands and buzz when she shuffled them like the wings of hummingbirds. She’d bonded to them right away.
But the cards spoke to her no more. Since the terrible incident that had scarred her and sent her into hiding, Tara had sealed them away and silenced them. Still, she’d never been able to destroy them.
Tara rested her chin in the palm of her hand, hair tricking over her wrist, reluctant to touch the deck. Her gaze brushed the picture of Lowell Magnusson and his daughter, smiling at her from glossy paper.
She feared opening the door to her intuitions again, to the synchronicities that would wake her from sound sleep. But Sophia had opened the door for her, and there was no silencing the clarion of the knowledge that someone needed her help.
Tara sighed, reached for the deck. Just one attempt at a reading and she’d put the cards away again. Then she’d tell Sophia she couldn’t help.
She centered herself, putting her feet flat on the floor and her hands palm up, open in her lap. She listened to her breath. Tara could also hear the whirr of the refrigerator, the cat’s snores, the splintering of ice outside, a crackle of a last ember in the fireplace. But she focused on her breath, and that sound drowned out the others. She emptied her thoughts and concentrated them on Lowell Magnusson. When she felt calm and still, she reached for the cards. The deck flexed in a familiar rhythm as she shuffled. Her hands still remembered.
The idea of the Tarot was centuries old. Predecessors to the modern deck of playing cards, they retained the archetypical imagery of the hero’s journey through two series: the Major and Minor Arcana.
The twenty-two images of the Major Arcana depicted ideas and archetypes that had existed throughout time: death, rebirth, life, justice. . . all abstract ideas embedded in the soul from the beginning of time. They could represent major events or pivotal people in one’s life. In the modern deck of playing cards, only one of these cards survived: the Joker. It was the analogue to the first card of the Major Arcana, the Fool, representing innocence. Somehow, it was ironic that innocence would always survive through the ages.
The fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana were divided into four suits: cups, wands, swords, and pentacles. Their modern analogues of hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds lived on in every poker room, casino, game of solitaire, and senior citizens bridge group in the world. Each suit was associated with an element and an affinity: cups to water and feelings; wands to fire and action; swords to air and realms of thought; and pentacles to earth and prosperity. The Minor Arcana most often represented the attitudes and feelings of the questioner, where the court cards of each suit—the kings, queens, knights, and pages—could often represent people met along the questioner’s journey.
Together, these enduring images of the Tarot were intended to trigger the questioner’s imagination. They used symbols to bring hidden information into the conscious mind, by creating associations and emotions. Each individual’s reaction to a symbol would be unique, colored by experience, memory, and situation. These unique reactions yielded an association meaningful to the questioner. Jungian psychologists believed that the Tarot provided a pathway of connections, a means for the conscious mind to reach into the subconscious using symbols as a tool. But Tara knew Tarot could access much, much more.
“What do I need to know?” she thought aloud, working the deck. She shuffled until her mind felt blank and the cards seemed to stick together. She placed the deck to her right and began a Celtic Cross reading; although differences in placement varied among readers, it was the oldest and most common pattern of laying out the cards—the spread. A spread was a way of asking a question, a framework for a story to develop. The Celtic Cross was a broad reading, touching on past, present, future, and the querent’s place in the environment. This version had been her mother’s favorite, and one of the first spreads Tara had learned.
She drew the first card and laid it faceup on the center of the scarf. This card represented the present situation: the Four of Swords. A knight lay in effigy in a church. Light streamed through stained-glass windows, illuminating four swords hanging over his head, and a wreath of white roses lay on the effigy’s hands. Tara’s mouth twisted. It signified enforced solitude, respite to heal. . . but could also suggest fear of facing the world.
She drew the second card, laid it crosswise across the first. This represented her immediate obstacle or support. The High Priestess stared back at her with a direct, serious expression. The Priestess held a sheaf of paper and was crowned with a silver moon headdress, representing spiritual mystery. Tara’s attention drifted to the file folder, and she thought of Sophia’s silver moon earrings. Sophia both opposed Tara’s solitude and supported her leaving it. Beyond Sophia, Tara thought of the Pythia, the Priestess of her own secret order.
She drew another card and laid it vertically above the others, directly below Magnusson’s picture. This card crowned the first two and represented the highest destiny that could be hoped for in the situation. The card depicted the Magician, the inventor, the alchemist. . . the source of vital creativity. A man in a violet cloak stood holding a wand to the sky, with symbols of the four elements spread on a table before him: a sword, a pentacle, a wand, and a chalice. . . air, earth, fire, and water, made one. Above the Magician’s head was the figure-eight shaped lemniscate, the sign of infinity, glowing golden against a background of lilies. Tara’s gaze flickered up to the scientist’s photo.
Tara steepled her hands before her. The fact the Magician was in the destiny position suggested Magnusson could be found. The two last cards laid out before her worried her. Both were Major Arcana, large archetypes cycling through life. This question was important, of great weight, heavy as lead.
She drew the fourth card and placed it below the first three to symbolize the distant past influencing the situation. The Two of Swords. The card depicted a blindfolded woman sitting on a beach, balancing two swords in crossed arms, one on each shoulder. The ocean roared behind her. Tara tipped her head, absorbing the card. The card could denote the deliberate closing of one’s eyes to the truth of the ocean, a closed heart, or unwillingness to choose sides. A precarious situation, to be sure. Tara couldn’t tell if this referred to Magnusson’s experience, or to her own. It seemed her experiences and feelings were bleeding over into the reading.
She placed the next card to the right of the Priestess to represent the recent past. The Eight of Pentacles was reversed, its image upside down from Tara’s point of view. A man worked at a bench, meticulously tooling disks of pentacles, absorbed in his work. In the upright position, this would have meant pride in one’s work. Reversed, it suggested unsatisfying work, professional envy, jealousy, or covetousness.
This was the second eight she’d drawn. Her thoughts drifted back to the lemniscate, the infinity sign gracing the Magician’s head. She was certain these last two cards referred to Magnusson’s situation.
She drew a sixth card, placed it to the left of the other cards. This card would describe the near future and near influences. The Knight of Pentacles brooded over a disk engraved with a star cradled gently in his hands. He was dark haired, sitting astride a black horse. A practical man. A man of action, deeply rooted in the physical world. Tara mentally filed this image away for later. She did not know this person, and he did not seem like an aspect of her own personality. Perhaps he would figure into the investigation.
She placed the seventh card on the lowest right-hand corner of the table. This represented Tara, as the questioner. The Queen of Swords, the snow queen. The card showed a crowned woman sitting on a throne before a gray sky. Wind and snow tangled in her hair and cloak, and she held a silver sword upright. She held the sword in her right hand, but held her left hand as if the sword of her intellect had cut her. She looked at a horizon Tara couldn’t see, and her expression was one of sorrow. The traditional meaning: sadness, sterility, mourning. After Sophia’s visit, it wasn’t hard for Tara to imagine herself in that context.