#fortune-teller

She walked up to it and read the words written there:

FORTUNE TELLER

Discover Your Future $10

Her head still swam on a sea of booze-fueled stupor and a cocktail of dried-up adrenaline and endorphins that had followed her experience of decking some jerk in the bar fight.

And boy oh boy, she thought, had she decked him good. Probably cost him some teeth.

She dug around in her pocket and crammed out a wad of crumpled-up dollar bills.

Flipping through them and counting the last few in audible whispers, she shrugged and entered. Her self-destructive streak had been giving her a good time that night, all things considered—looking back upon one of her worst years in life—and she could use a silly little pick-me-up in form of some kook reading tarot cards or whatever their deal was.

Holly’s eyes watered and she coughed from the stinging wooden scent of sweet incense hanging heavy in the air, waving it away with a hand in front of her as if that helped at all. She blinked a few times and took in her surroundings.

Strange paraphernalia, such as amulets of feathers and animal teeth and dream catchers and silly crystals and rabbit feet and other nonsense dangled from silver chains connected to thin beams, encircling a small round garden table with two foldable plastic chairs in front of and behind the table each.

Dirt or gravel crunched as she pulled out the nearest chair and took a seat. The weary plastic frame creaked under the weight of her body. She exhaled and savored the strange warmth captured inside the confines of the tent. But the sensations of pain flooded back over her again, coupled with the sore aching feelings left over from her extensive workout before heading out for her sad little session of solo New Year’s Eve drinking.

Just before she could dwell too much on her loneliness or how that asshole in the pub had had it coming for how he talked to her, and she gazed too long at the blood where the skin on her knuckles had split, the curtains swished. A gust of cool air swept through the tent’s interior, and a figure emerged from the shadows of the tent’s darker, deeper bowels.

An elderly lady—whose face a deep purple hood concealed—hunched over and leaning against an elaborately carved wooden cane beset with what must have been fake plastic jewels, hobbled over to the table and sat down across from Holly.

A real damn cliché, she thought to herself, looking the feeble old woman up and down.

The fortune-teller had an air of precision and routine about her, each movement studied and repeated a million times. Common for any good grifter, she figured. Holly had not even noticed when this fortune-teller hack had placed candles upon the previously naked surface of the table, but the old woman now leaned forward and lit them with a cheap-looking red plastic lighter.

“Ten thousand dreams you have, yet with the insight of a donkey they’ll do nobody any good,” the old woman croaked in a thick accent.

Russian? Holly neither knew nor care, she did not get around much. She had avoided education and learning about the world as much as she could, focusing her life’s work more on trying to flush any memories of her traumatic past down the toilet.

“You callin’ me a donkey, you old hag?” Holly asked the fortune-teller.

The old woman looked up and the growing glow of candlelight illuminated her face, shedding some light on her countenance. A roadmap of wrinkles and a hideous scar along her cheek marked a face weathered by time and sanded down by bizarre experiences. She glowered at Holly, the reflection of burning wicks dancing in her irises.

“I see you walk a path of self-imposed exile, looking to engage in pleasure that interferes with any sort of deeper introspection,” the fortune-teller replied, grimacing at Holly. “Drink, fuck, drugs, drowning yourself in a dullard’s entertainment. Yes, I’m calling you a stupid donkey.”

Holly blinked and shook her head once the space for several sentences unspoken had spread between them.

“I mean, I guess you’re not desperate for business or ten fucking dollars, you fuckin’ asshole,” Holly said after swallowing an even angrier response.

Right before she pushed herself back up in a huff, a set of gnarled and bony fingers slapped down on Holly’s hand, pinning her in place. She refrained from leaving or even budging now, taken aback by this sudden physical response. Holly’s muscles twitched—she pushed back down the urge to lash out and give this old woman a fistful of knuckles like she had bequeathed upon the serial sexual harasser from the bar earlier.

Would probably split this old hag’s skull with one straight hit.

Another gust of cold air breezed through the tent’s interior, cutting across Holly’s burning cheeks and sending a shiver down her spine. It was like she felt the creepy thing that was about to happen before it happened.

Then the old woman spoke again.

“You dream of a black palace, hidden in between the cracks of this world. A world between worlds, where an old giant sleeps and only emerges to spread his dark seed in the world and reap the souls of those who he believes commit wrong.”

The blood drained from Holly’s face and her spine tingled anew. Over the course of those two creepy sentences, she had gone from wanting to snap this woman in half, to just wanting to up and leave, to sitting in shock, frozen and yearning to hear what else she had to say.

Because the old hag was spot on.

She indeed dreamt of that black palace. The place haunted Holly in her nightmares, ever since the events of her traumatic childhood. Constant medication and therapy had led her to believe that that palace was not real. That those infinite halls were only imaginary.

“You hear its whispers; you hear his words of caution. Yet you seek to commit sin after sin, sacrificing your innocence and drinking every humiliation as it feeds your rage, hoping to return there, and finish what he started. Your blood boils at the thought of all the things he took from you, the life you never lived, and now you want to tear the walls of his black palace down.”

Holly tossed the wad of crumpled dollar bills onto the table, convinced that this fortune-teller was worth her salt. But the old lady seemed to ignore the cash.

“I’m listening,” Holly told her, the words hissing out hoarse and tortured.

The flames danced in the old woman’s eyes. Little explosions crackled outside when new fireworks erupted, likely closer to midnight than the ones earlier. Holly was frozen in place, enraptured by this old hag’s presence.

She knew. Therefore, everything she said came crashing down on Holly with the crushing weight of horrible truth. Each word sliced through the haze of drugs and alcohol and woke her up more and more, awakening her to a secret world, a hidden entity with long blackened claws that peeled away at the layers of hollow pretenses of what people dubbed reality.

This time, Holly took the old woman’s hand into her own. Shook it, silently imploring her to go on. That gnarled hand was light and lifeless, as cold as the wintry air outside. Perhaps even colder.

The old woman let her but produced something from the folds of her veiled garments with her free hand. A crinkled old Polaroid photo which she gingerly placed upon the table in between them, right beside where their hands had met.

Though time had faded the image on the simple square photo and age had yellowed the originally white rim framing it, Holly recognized the picture right away. The black palace. Marble walls streaked with white and crimson veins, engraved with incomprehensibly alien writings, they stood out in the background of the picture, obscured by fog.

She could practically taste the dust of that place. That smell rust and iron in the air, and light that came from both everywhere and nowhere. Holly remembered slipping in that puddle of pus-like white substance on those sleek, smoothly polished floors.

She remembered that huge hand, encased in blackened iron, palm open and beckoning her to wander into the light. Attached to an arm too big to fit into the picture, just out of frame, huge and ominous and dwarfing the photographer.

Although she had not seen this exact scene with her eyes, she remembered sitting on the lap of that giant, that reaper, that monstrosity that dwelled in the world in between worlds, drinking in a dark destiny before it released her into the shambles of her rotten life.

“You can return there now, if you dare,” said the old hag.

Holly’s lip quivered, anticipating the words she wanted to utter without hesitation yet held back only by a budding seed of dread.

“Yes,” Holly whispered in reply, though inside she yelled it out for every world to hear.

“You can pursue your revenge, if that is what you wish,” the witch offered Holly.

“Yes.”

The old woman’s hand slipped out of Holly’s grip, which had gone limp with the dream-like state that had befallen her.

Her head swam again. Not in any stupor or haze of being under the influence, but the swirling cosmos of stars in her mind, the infinite sea of possibilities. And hurtling through that darkness between the stars, homing in on the brightest one, the flaring sun that shone out to her, representing her yearning to end things here and now.

The old woman stood aside and, with a sweeping gesture of her withered old arm, motioned towards the darkness between the curtains from which she had emerged to give Holly her “reading.”

The chair underneath Holly got knocked away, tumbling off the side and clattering against the worn rugs on the tent’s inner grounds, so eager was she to return to the black palace. To finish this, once and for all.

To find her own brand of peace, either way. Holly’s heart pounded with certainty, embracing the imagination of horrible deaths. Of the mental image of that skinless corpse, resting in a pile of human refuse and bodily fluids emitted only by decomposition. Of blood seeping from cut flesh—her own cut flesh. Of the giant sitting in his massive throne, commanding an innocent child to leave, lest he judge her like he had judged her parents.

“Wait,” said the fortune-teller.

Her gnarled, almost claw-like fingers rested gently on Holly’s leather-jacketed shoulder.

The old woman hastily scooped up the dollar bills and stuffed them into a well-hidden pocket upon her person. She paced back and forth as if uncertain where to fetch something she had forgotten, then produced a brown egg from another pocket.

Holly’s brow arched as she watched in disbelief, eager to enter the darkness within the tent and return to the black palace, but patient as the old woman seemed to know what she was doing.

The fortune-teller slapped the table’s surface thrice, sending drips of wax to fly from the candles.

“Iä, iä,” she chanted. “Wgah'nagl fhtagn.”

She slammed the egg down onto the table, hand flat, where yolk and egg white oozed out from underneath her palm. Blood trickled out along with the egg white in slimy, bizarre coils, like black oil floating on water and refusing to mix.

“Go. Now,” she said, and pointed to the darkness behind Holly.

Holly need not be told twice. Fireworks erupted outside, as if to orchestrate her steps into that place. Loud artificial thunderclaps, rupturing the deceptive silence of the night. The clock had ticked past midnight. The new year arrived.

She turned and pushed past the curtains.

Frosted tendrils of ivy and shards of rock crystal and quartz cracked underneath the treaded soles of Holly’s boots. Clusters of black berries drooped from thick sheets of plants creeping down the walls, and she pushed through the foliage that followed the silk and velvet drapes that she left behind her in her advance.

Fog billowed out around her and the tent turned out to be far larger on the inside than it looked like from the outside. For this was not the realm of the fortune-teller’s tent anymore—it was the black palace.

After decades of nightmares of this place, after all the time she spent being told and letting them tell her it was not real, she had returned to it. Found her way back, in the most unexpected of places. Instantly discarded all that conditioning, knowing this to be real—more real than any other experience in her whole life.

She ripped at the vines in her way, digging her strong fingers into anything that allowed her to grip it; dragging strands of plant life, snapping twigs and tearing leaves apart in her struggle to push forward. Every step took her deeper into that place of mist and marble and despair made flesh.

The underbrush tripped her up and Holly stumbled forward until her boots slapped against the hard floors of the black palace. The crevice in the wall, lined with sprawling tangles of wild plants, loomed like a wound in the shiny walls behind her. She still could have turned back now, but had no intention of doing so, nor would she even waste a thought on the mere notion.

Before her, a mummified skeleton rested on the floor, right where she had seen the skinless body of her father.

Each step she took landed on the ground with more force than the one preceding it. Her courage and anger swelled in her chest in equal measure and she knew where she had to go.

The pounding pulse of her heart drowned out the chorus of whispers that hailed from the walls all around her, and she arrived by the back of that tremendous giant throne. That monolith of wrought iron and cold stone.

Its shape and edges looked more jagged, sinister, vicious, sharper, and pointier than she remembered them. Like time had filtered them in a haze, dulled them to the point of blunting the breathing horror that the throne exuded in her memories, but her hatred and drive to find the owner of that throne lent her a clarity that pierced the veil of the fog around her.

She marched towards the throne and rounded its corners, craning her neck to see who sat upon it. But no legs rested there. There was nobody there. The throne stood empty, tall and imposing.

His voice returned, finally, like it had reached her through the curtains of dreams, haunting her nights and rendering them sleepless.

That monotonous tone, that detached, uncaring inflection riding on every word.

“Finally, you have returned to your true home,” he spoke.

A voice that came from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. Even swiveling and looking around, she could not pinpoint its origin.

Instead, Holly grunted and gritted her teeth and scrambled her way up the side of the throne, grabbing hold of every angled diagonal and engraved indentation that afforded her hold, climbing up onto the seat of the throne upon which she could stand and better survey these twilit halls, perhaps rise above the fog.

“Behold the codex,” Holly spoke, every word ringing out with the same monotony as his voice.

Her blood ran cold with the realization. The giant was no more, for she had taken his place.

“Finally, a successor to the throne,” she said, speaking to herself. Imperious in volume, calm and stoic in the distinct and sharp absence of song that her speech delivered.

Herald of the void.

From where she stood, the mists swirled along the blackened floors of these halls. Still, the ceilings reached to dizzying heights, swallowed by darkness and unfathomable to natural human sights.

But as blood shot into Holly’s eyes and her transformation commenced on the most microscopic of levels, her vision changed as well. She saw windows into the world within that darkness, framed upon the horizon of the walls of the palace around her. Moving, living, fleeting images of the world beyond this world between the worlds, teeming with life, bustling with people.

Some gazed up at the fireworks, marveling at their splendiferous colors and bright lights. Others drank themselves into a stupor, laughing and carousing till they committed acts of unspeakable stupidity. There, someone cheated on their spouse. Elsewhere, someone stabbed a man to death over nothing but naked greed.

Holly saw it all. She witnessed every crime, saw every even so minute transgression unfolding before her eyes—eyes growing wide with terror, and the unfettered hatred in her heart taking over, with cold and slimy tendrils snaking outwards from that darkness within, infecting every fiber of her being, and filling her with murderous purpose.

And come one year from now, it would be time for her to ride. To embark upon the gifting and reaping. It would be her first round, her first turn as the new successor to this throne—as the new master of the black palace. A first time of tasting their despair and relief and drinking in their fear.

With many more rounds to follow.

In time, she would grow to fit upon that throne.

But for now, she had a year’s time. To watch. Remember every transgression. And make note of those whose punishment would arrive by the end of the year.