CHAPTER THREE
The last client of the evening was a woman in her late thirties named Brenda.
She had been coming in every three weeks for the past four months, always booking the last hour slot.
She always paid in cash and always cried at some point during the reading.
Tonight the tears had arrived right on schedule, somewhere around the forty-minute mark, when Celestine had gently suggested that Brenda's late mother was at peace and had forgiven her for missing the hospital visit.
Celestine had no idea whether Brenda's mother had forgiven her.
She had no idea whether Brenda's mother was at peace, or conscious in any form, or anything other than gone.
What she did know was that Brenda had mentioned the missed hospital visit during her very first session, unprompted and with visible guilt, which meant it was the thing she had actually come in to process.
The rest of it—the card draws, the crystal, the careful questions that sounded like statements—was just the scaffolding that got Brenda to the place where she could let herself cry about it.
It was not exactly a noble profession. Celestine had long since admitted to herself. But it was a profitable one, and Brenda left a twenty-dollar tip on top of the session fee, so there was that.
"Same time in three weeks?" Celestine asked at the door, her voice warm and unhurried.
"Yes, please," Brenda said, dabbing at the corner of her eye. "I always feel so much lighter after I see you."
"That's what matters," Celestine said. She sincerely meant this; in her view, helping someone feel lighter was a legitimate service regardless of the mechanism. She watched Brenda walk down the front steps and disappear toward the parking lot on Johanna Street, then closed and locked the door.
The shop occupied a narrow storefront on South Congress, wedged between a vintage clothing boutique and a juice bar that played music too loud until ten o'clock most nights.
The exterior was hard to miss. A hand-painted sign above the door read MADAME CELESTINE in tall black letters, and below it, in the window, a large custom neon piece glowed in deep violet and gold.
It spelled out her name again in a flowing script, and below that, the word READINGS in smaller letters.
Celestine had paid a considerable amount for that sign seven years ago and considered it the single best investment she had ever made.
People photographed it constantly. It had its own minor existence on social media, tagged in posts by tourists and locals alike, and every tag was a small advertisement she didn't have to pay for.
Inside, the shop was designed with the same attention to effect.
The front room was narrow and draped in dark fabric.
Several shelves of crystals and books ran along one wall, and a display of tarot decks were arranged behind glass on the other.
Battery-powered candles sat in iron holders at regular intervals, casting a warm and reasonably convincing flicker.
Celestine had switched to battery candles three years ago after nearly setting a tapestry on fire, and she considered it one of her better decisions.
The reading room in the back was where the real work happened.
It was small and deliberately intimate, with two chairs facing each other across a round table covered in a burgundy cloth.
The overhead light was on a dimmer, kept low during sessions.
On a side table against the wall sat the centerpiece of the room, a large glass sphere set into an ornate base, lit from below by a concealed neon element in pale blue, with a small fog machine built into the base that pushed a thin coil of vapor up through a vent in the bottom of the sphere.
It looked, in the right light, genuinely mysterious.
It had cost her eleven hundred dollars to have it custom-built by a theatrical prop designer in San Antonio, and it had paid for itself within the first two months.
Clients loved it. They leaned toward it, stared into it, whispered about it afterward.
One woman had told Celestine that she could feel “an amazing positive energy” emanating from it.
But what really emanated from it was neon light and water vapor.
She turned the sign in the window to CLOSED and went back to the reading room to straighten up.
She moved the chairs back to their neutral positions, switched off the fog machine, and collected the tarot deck she'd used for Brenda's reading, squaring the cards and returning them to their box.
She checked her phone, saw a reminder about tomorrow's first appointment at ten, and set it back on the side table.
The crystal ball display was still running. She reached over to the base unit, where a simple toggle switch controlled the whole assembly, the neon element below the sphere and the fog machine together on a single circuit that fed from the same transformer powering the storefront sign.
The display flickered.
It was not the normal fade of a dying fog machine or a tube running low.
It was a sharp, stuttering flicker, the blue light dropping out entirely for a half-second and then returning at a different intensity than it had been before.
Celestine frowned and looked at the base more closely.
The toggle was in the on position and nothing appeared to have shifted.
She had seen neon tubes flicker before when the transformer was getting old, and this one had been running for six years.
She made a mental note to have someone come look at it.
The display flickered again, harder this time.
She reached toward the base with her right hand, not toward the toggle but toward the sphere itself, meaning to check whether the fog vent was obstructed. Her fingers closed around the lower edge of the sphere's housing.
The shock hit her before she was even aware she had touched the metal.
It was not the brief, sharp snap of static electricity.
It was a full and violent current that seized her hand.
It felt as if something has physically taken hold of her, the painful sensation rocketing up her arm and into her chest in what felt like a single instantaneous event.
Her body did not respond to any instruction she tried to give it.
The world went white and loud, and then she was on the floor on her back.
The reading room ceiling was above her, the dimmed overhead light casting its familiar low glow across the draped fabric walls.
She lay there for several seconds without moving, though she had no awareness of the time passing.
Her right arm felt wrong from the fingers to the shoulder.
Her back registered the floor distantly, as though the information was coming from somewhere far away.
She could hear her own breathing, but she could not control it, and within a few seconds she understood that she was not going to be able to get up.
The current had done something to her chest. She could feel it in the irregular, lurching rhythm there, something that was trying to be a heartbeat and not quite managing it. Her left hand moved a few inches across the floor on its own, a small involuntary motion that accomplished nothing.
The crystal ball display was still on. She could see it from where she lay, the blue light steady now, the fog rising in its usual thin coil through the vent in the base. The flicker was gone. Whatever had caused it had resolved itself, apparently, after it had finished with her.
Celestine had spent seventeen years telling people what she saw in that sphere.
She had described colors and shapes and presences to several thousand paying clients, had spoken with calm authority about things she did not believe in and had never believed in, and had walked out of this room at the end of every single night satisfied with the transaction.
The blue light was the last thing she saw…and it told her nothing.