Not the folk-song, but a sort of story, for a sort of change, this time concerning the Deck of Seasons. Just because…
She Moved Through the Fair
Why they’d set up here, on the November wasteland at the edge of the town, she couldn’t imagine. It was the worst fair Lucy had ever seen, but she was drunk, and the peeling, washed-out attractions were better than the thoughts in her head. Wild claims rang from the shooting stall; teenage boys jeered as a lone child rode the carousel. In the shadow of a Hall of Mirrors marked Closed, two girls fought over a stuffed bear that was already torn and smeared with mud. Every voice had a slightly hysterical edge to it.
She turned from candyfloss and discarded lager cans, seeking something, anything, to distract her. One last ‘attraction’, a drab, square tent, stood by the access road. Almost lost in the darkness, it appeared as tattered and as lonely as she felt. She threw the empty bottle of Bushmills aside and swayed over, pausing to read the sign propped outside the tent.
Change. A single word, scrawled on a piece of cardboard. An offer, an instruction? Who cared?
Lucy staggered forward, catching one heel in the rough grass and clutching the tent flap to keep herself upright. The material tore, then held.
“Bollocks.” She managed to right herself, and pull the canvas aside. “Anybody home?”
The inside was no bigger than expected. There were no magical lights, no fantastical perfumes on the air. It smelled of damp, and was as disappointing as the rest of the fair. She could see a small table with an old man sat behind it, reading a book by the glow of a storm-lantern.
“Are you like, a fortune teller sort of thing?” she asked.
The man looked up, wire-rimmed glasses askew on a narrow nose. His face reminded her of her grandfather, laid out in an open coffin, waxy and pale. That thought didn’t sit well with the whisky, and she tried to compose herself.
“I mean, Tarot or palm-reading, you know.”
He closed the book and put it aside. “No.”
Lucy blinked, and wished that she’d had more – or less – to drink. Either might have worked.
“OK.” She turned to find her way out again, but the dirty canvas confounded her. She tugged at it, looked around and nearly lost her footing again.
“You should probably sit down.” The old man’s voice was unwelcoming.
There was a low stool on her side of the table. More because of the Bushmills than anything else, she did as he said. Sit down, rest for a minute…
“D’you… do you have anything to drink?” Her voice was more slurred than she’d expected.
“No.”
She nodded. “Fair enough.. Neither do I, now.”
“You’re drunk, lost and in need.” he said at last. “It might be best if you went home to sleep it off, or found a friend and talked. The morning might be different.”
“If there was any chance of that,” she said, more coherently than before, “I wouldn’t be drunk, or lost, or in need.”
The old man tried again. “Family, perhaps?”
“Even worse than being here.”
They sat in silence for a minute or two, broken eventually by a sputter from the storm lantern, which hung from a roof-pole. The old man glanced at it, then reached under the table and brought out a pack of cards.
“So it is Tarot, or that sort of crap.” Lucy said triumphantly. “Gypsy Rose Lee, you know her?”
He ignored her. The cards were large in his big, walnut-knuckled hands, almost twice the size of playing cards. There was no design on their dark, velvet green backs. He adjusted his glasses. In the lantern light, she could see hairs sprouting from his ears and a tangle of eyebrows that almost hid small, pale eyes. It wasn’t her grandfather, thank God, but the age must have been similar – seventy plus. He was almost bald, as if to compensate for the profusion of hair everywhere else.
“Do I get a reading, then?”
He held up the cards. “This is the Deck of Seasons. It comes when it is needed, it says what it must. You… are of little consequence.”
“Tell me about it.” She laughed, tasted sour whisky in her throat.
“I have no more choice than you.” His tone was suddenly different, almost sympathetic.
“What do you mean?”
Painfully, he spread velvet green on the scarred pine table, each card laid carefully next to the last, face down, five in all.
“Turn them.”
She stared at the old man, took in the egg stains on his jacket, the frayed cuffs of his shirt. It was that moment of drunkenness when everything seemed oddly clear and sharp, like the edge of a new knife, and she knew that she should leave, there and then.
“I’m, like, sorry to have bothered you,” she mumbled. She reached into her jeans, found a handful of pound coins and tossed them onto the table, gold against the green.
The tent flap was there. She grabbed it like a lifebelt, swung herself free from the tent. Outside the rain had started again, and the teenagers were slinking away, bored. It struck her that she knew a petrol station attendant who was very understanding about after-hours drinking…
He sighed, and turned over each card in order. Their faces spoke of sorrow and failed endeavours; of a soul lost to indecision. He knew what the last one would be before he turned it, but the ritual had to be completed. When the Deck of Seasons was in play, no one could leave the game.
And there it lay, a cold finality. The Winter King.
He replaced the cards in the deck, and closed his eyes for a moment. The night was over, and he was tired.
Lucy Elizabeth Granger, twenty seven years old, died whilst crossing the forecourt of an almost deserted service station. Eleven thirty five at night, on the eleventh day of November. Witnesses agreed that she’d walked directly into the path of the truck which hit her. No, they didn’t know if she’d noticed it or not. They thought they’d seen her stagger from the nearby fair, but by the time the police thought to question anyone there, the waste-ground was empty, the stalls and shows long gone.
Dense, unseasonal ice had coated the tarmac that night, and the authorities attached no blame to the driver of the truck. Her death was recorded as misadventure.
Lucy’s husband, who had recently abandoned his wife in favour of his personal assistant, mumbled a confused eulogy at the service, eight days later. As for his new acquisition, she waited in the car, fretting at the short black skirt she wore and wondering where her life was really going.
Few others attended the funeral, but as those few were leaving, the curate saw a thin figure place a posy of harebells on Lucy Grainger’s grave.
No-one seemed to know who the old man was, or why he was there.
END
jlg2017
