Chapter 10
Granny Nightjar sang a strange, haunting little melody in a minor key as she picked at the strings on the tarot bag, her fingers working at the knot like so many bird beaks pecking and digging at the ground, until the ribbon fell away and she was able to slide the tarot cards out onto the surface of the table.
I knew without a doubt that they were the oldest deck of tarot cards I’d ever seen—in fact, they might be the oldest tarot cards anyone had ever seen.
The edges were battered, the images faded from endless handling and shuffling.
I’d never seen illustrations like these; they looked hand-painted, a collection of woodland animals, but…
wrong. Their faces were strangely elongated, their bones poking through their fur, their eyes wild and glowing.
They were roped about with withered and poisonous-looking vines of flowers, rotted fruits, and butterflies with melting wings.
They repelled me with their otherness, and yet I couldn’t look away from them, a menagerie of nightmare creatures.
As Granny Nightjar began to move the cards deftly through her fingers, the images upon them began to move.
At first, I thought it was a trick of the light, an optical illusion, like thumbing through one of those little cartoon flipbooks you get as a kid.
But as I continued to watch, mesmerized, I knew that this was no trick.
The animals writhed and danced and leaped about on the surfaces of the cards, as though enchanted by music so old and so mystical that my unpracticed ears couldn’t hear it.
Granny Nightjar began to lay the cards on the table in different formations, and as she did so, the animals began to leap from their own cards into others, disappearing off the edge of one card only to reappear, emerging into the next.
I felt dizzy as I watched them, unable to concentrate on the words Granny Nightjar was half-singing, half-whispering as she worked.
At last, she laid one final card on top of the others, and all the animals vanished, leaving only crushed and withered fruits and plants and the occasional bone behind.
“You divined your answer correctly,” Granny Nightjar said, raising her head beneath the veil, and burning right through me with the eyes I could barely see. “The bones, they sang for you, and you understood the song, didn’t you?”
I didn’t know how to answer. The thought of singing bones was too horrible to contemplate, and I had to push the image away before it could take hold in my head.
Granny Nightjar didn’t seem to notice my distress.
She was nodding along as though I had answered in the affirmative, rather than just staring blankly at her.
She went on, “Yes, a song of travel, of wandering the spaces between places. A journey you must take, and the door is already open for you. You had the key all along, you know. You’ve carried it with you always. ”
I frowned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. What key? I don’t have a key—”
“The key. The key,” Granny Nightjar repeated, tapping one hand against her chest, right over her heart. “You’ve used it before. While you slept. That was when the Gray Man found you. You let him in, child.”
My heart was thundering now. “I didn’t mean to…
I didn’t want him there, in my dreams, I…
wait… how do you know about the Gray Man?
” I had read through a hundred accounts of the Darkness since I’d started looking for answers, and I couldn’t find any descriptions that fit the Gray Man, except in Bernadette’s art, and that was only because she was having visions about me.
She was experiencing flashes of my life, and so she saw the Darkness the way it had appeared to me.
“He is here, a shadow that follows in your wake.”
“He’s here?”
“You brought him, child. Don’t you see?”
I swallowed hard against an urge to be sick. “No, I… that’s the problem, I’m… I’m looking for him. I haven’t seen him in months, he’s not…”
“He’s behind the door, child. The door. The DOOR.”
She repeated the words impatiently, her lilting song of a voice growing louder than I would have thought possible from the depths of her tiny frame.
I looked first at the door behind her, then the doorway behind me, wondering what the hell she was talking about.
She grunted impatiently, then she snapped the arthritic tips of her fingers and pointed at me.
“Naughty, naughty child. What have you brought with you into this house?”
My heart raced, so that it felt like a constant hum in my chest. My hands, pressed against the table top, began to slide as a cold sweat broke out on my palms.
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
Granny Nightjar leaned forward, and for the first time, I could glimpse the outline of her face as it pressed into the veil.
Skin sunken and wrinkled like a dried apple.
A hooked nose. Eyes that sparkled strangely.
I felt like those eyes were burrowing straight into me, digging at my racing thoughts like jagged, dirty fingernails, picking them apart inside my skull.
“But you suspect.”
The word felt as though it had been tugged right out of me. “Yes.”
“Tell me. Tell me what you suspect.”
I swallowed convulsively. I didn’t want to say it out loud. Saying it out loud would make it real, a thing I couldn’t take back.
“The Darkness. I think it… I think it’s in the mirror.”
Granny Nightjar nodded slowly.
“It is, isn’t it?” I mouthed, barely a sound passing my trembling lips. “It’s there. It’s with me.”
“Yes,” Granny Nightjar murmured. “And no.”
My humming heart stilled. It felt like every mote of dust in the room had stopped drifting, becoming motionless like the candle flames overhead. I feared to breathe, to break the spell that held it all in thrall.
“What do you know of scrying, child?”
I blinked, the question unexpected, and it took me a moment to gather myself enough to answer. “Not… not a lot. I’ve only really done it once, during a lesson with Xiomara.”
“With this mirror?”
“No. It was a… a birdbath. I sort of… fell through it into this empty place. And Ast—my grandmother was there, but…” my voice trailed away as I tried to wade through the horror of that memory, tried to put into words the details that still crept into my dreams, haunting me.
But I didn’t need to. Granny Nightjar knew.
“But the spirit world was severed,” she supplied. “And your grandmother couldn’t truly reach you.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “And I… I’ve been too scared to try it since.”
“But you have tried it.”
I frowned and shook my head. “No,” I insisted. “I really haven’t—”
“You stood before the reflective surface. You cleared your mind. You asked a question. And you got an answer.”
It was another moment before the horror of the realization broke over me.
I had used scrying again, but it hadn’t been intentional at all.
I was just standing in front of my own bedroom mirror, thinking, when a flash of something came into the mirror.
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to laugh or cry.
How was it that I had been actively struggling over my magic for weeks, trying to get an answer; and the moment I’d managed to get one had been utterly accidental, and so unexpected that I didn’t even realize what had happened?
“Mmm,” Granny Nightjar nodded, as though satisfied. Then she lifted a gnarled old hand and pointed into the corner. “The mirror. Bring it to me.”
My eyes darted over to the mirror in the corner. “I… I don’t… are you sure?” The thought of removing the mirror from the protective Circle made panic rise in me like a tide.
Granny Nightjar didn’t reply. She didn’t move. She simply kept pointing into the corner, waiting.
Sighing, I rose from my seat and walked to the corner.
It felt like reaching out to pet a rabid animal as I extended my hand into the boundary of the Circle, and closed it over the frame of the mirror.
I might have imagined it, but I thought I felt it shudder angrily against my hand, as though it resented the bonds now wrapped around it.
I shook my head, dismissing the thought. I didn’t want it to be true.
Returning to the table, I hesitated, the mirror still held gingerly in my hands. Granny Nightjar tapped one yellowed fingernail on the tabletop, and I took the hint, placing the mirror carefully in front of her. Then I returned to my seat and waited, my leg bouncing with nervous energy.
Granny Nightjar leaned forward, her hands hovering over the fabric.
She made a strange sound, a long, low hissing, as she passed her hands through the air over and over.
Then she curled her left hand into a fist and knocked three times sharply on the table.
As though in answer, the candles in the chandelier above us dimmed, the flames shrinking in unison to tiny pinpoints of light, but not extinguishing completely.
Then she knocked her knuckles on the tabletop twice more, and the rope that I had knotted so tightly fell away, along with the wrappings of the sweatshirt.
The mirror lay face up, reflecting the ceiling and the tiny, still flames of the chandelier. It looked like the night sky. Granny Nightjar pressed a finger to the shadow of her lips behind the veil, warning me to stay quiet, but I’d never needed a warning less in my life.
“You see? He waits, child. Just here. On the other side of the door.”
“That’s… that’s a mirror,” I said, wondering if the old woman was becoming confused.
After all, even obscured by her veil, I could see enough to know that she looked about a thousand years old.
Maybe she was going senile. Maybe her words were more confusion than riddle—an unraveling rather than something to be unraveled.
But she was glaring at me, and even through the fabric, that stare was sharp enough to cut me.
“The mirror,” she said, “is the door. A portal. You’ve opened a portal here.”