The Hanged Man, part 1 of 2
.
How Mithy got her groove back, I suppose! Here's that London thing.
Title: The Hanged Man
Fandom: Tokyo Babylon...technically. An AU based on the premise, "what the story of TB would read as, set in London." This can be read as original work, I hope, and I have tagged it as such.
Rating: R, for britishisms, innuendo, understated violence, 90's London fashion, and oxford commas.
Wordcount: 11800. Split in two: Part 2 is here.
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The Hanged Man
tokyo babylon…sort of
Mithrigil Galtirglin
0. Knave
Perhaps there was one fortunate thing about being named “Atlas James Crowley”-namely, that when one’s grandmother or schoolfellows elected to summon me, I’d never be confused for one of the other dozens of Crowleys in the immediate vicinity. I’d hear all three names in succession frequently enough. I was not a troublesome child, no, quite the contrary actually. It’s that my family and associates often forgot I was there. Sometimes I wasn’t, that I’ll give them at least. I wandered, or I’d let my mind wander. And it would wander to the other times I’d wandered.
Horrifying, cyclical thing, really, my mind. For all the time I spend there, I’ve never stopped up all my fear of it.
Parts of it aren’t my own, or weren’t there. I recall an instance (the gaps in which I will later explain) when I was nearly ten years old, when I first came to London. It was the only time in my life I had been apart from my sister (whose name, Alcyone, is equally as unfortunate as mine and so she called herself Cho and everyone let her get away with it) and I’d seen hair like hers on a schoolgirl, walking with her classmates through Covent Garden. Covent Garden…a magnificent place, terrifying to a child as I, already so fearful of himself, to say nothing of the world he lived in. Grasping at that familiarity as I stood beside my grandmother in a city, not just any city but that city-it was instinctive, desperate. And so I slipped from Grandmother’s side and chased the girl.
She was dead. The schoolgirl, not my sister. I could sense it, scurrying after her, tripping over wares, into carts. Such a place, with all the lights of modernity, all the marquees proclaiming things I neither wanted nor understood, and yet, buskers, craftsmen, hawking their simplicity-and underfoot the stones, chips of mortar and dust kicking up around my shoes. The girls did not laugh; they did not notice me. How could they? There were thousands of dead in their world. As many dead there as living here, if not more.
I was ill-was sick, there, in Covent Garden. It was saturated with those dead, painfully, redolently so. That schoolgirl turned and still did not notice me, looked through me the way the living looked through her. She saw another, plainly another, someone taller. She screamed, and I did not hear it, only saw her face contort and her chest burst open. Blood melted through the streets and did not mark the living, consumed by the stone before her corpse could fall. Her eyes were not like mine or my sister’s.
Among the things I am, I am an exorcist; at nearly ten, that year, I had the gift and the will to apply it but lacked the strength. It did not stop me from trying. I called my cards, and I chanted my verse, and I raised my arms to dispel her.
And here is one of the gaps I so feared.
”Did you know,” someone said, ”that the streets of Covent Garden are paved with the souls of those who spite the Crown?”
I. Charlatan
As far as I know, I met Doctor Jonathan Waite at Paddington Underground, on the Ides of March, the year I turned sixteen. Nineteen-ninety. It is nearly painful to consider how long ago that was. How long ago I was. Sixteen, I was still the same height and build as Cho. I’d caught up with her again two years prior, and she groused so often that she’d never cross a meter and a half. So that’s about how tall I was when I crashed into Doctor Jonathan’s chest.
It would serve to describe him. Perhaps then you can comprehend my awe. First, his height-two meters and a hand. I distinctly remember the clip of his tie imprinting itself on my forehead. (I covered it with my hair for two days after.) For all that, he had little girth to him-dense, hard-muscled, and not skinny, but not of a footballer’s size or build. He was golden; his skin, his hair, his eyes. His eyelashes. Even behind his glasses I could see, gold eyelashes. I learned later that his paternal grandmother was from India, though that may have been a lie. Golden, though, so that the rings and cufflinks and pins he wore seemed untarnished, so that the navy of his suit seemed grey.
It was not the first time in my life that I felt envy. I knew later, much later, that it was the first time I felt covetous.
Considering that I had slammed into him hard enough to bruise, I discounted the next few moments as hallucination for several days afterward. He escorted me away from the platform, sat down beside me at a bench, and gave me back the called card I had been chasing. I apologised a thousand times for interrupting him and he insisted, no, my safety was now his primary concern. His voice startled me-deep, invasive. He asked if I minded that he looked me over, insisted, “I’m a physician.”
“Don’t trouble yourself with me, sir-Doctor,” I said.
“They all say that,” he said, and slid aside, put his hand on my forehead. I winced when it touched the bruise. “And then they wind up worse off for not having nipped the problem in the bud. Now look me in the eyes-there, good, no undue dilation. Your name?”
“-Crowley. Atlas Crowley.”
He smiled. It was silver, against all the gold. “With a name like that, are you sure you don’t have a concussion?”
I laughed, and it hurt my head. “I’m named for the star, not the titan the star’s named for.”
“Well, I can see that.” His eyes narrowed on mine, his glasses closer, close enough to whiten briefly. I remember that when he commented, “Or I could, if your eyes weren’t so captivating,” I couldn’t see his at all. He slid an arm under mine to hoist me up-I gripped it in my gloves. “Let’s get you somewhere a little less noisy, shall we?”
The rest is not a gap but a blur, a series of seemingly inconsequential conversations that I am sure, if I recalled in full, would haunt me more potently than their absence. We did find someplace less loud, outside, overlooking Bishop’s Bridge but not quite on it. I explained so much of myself, sorted my cards-he remarked, as so many have, that I must be a descendent of that Crowley, a fact to which I admitted accepted uncertainty. “Grandmother insists it,” I told him, “enough that she married a man who claimed the same.” He admitted to turning a few fortunes of his own-and he ordered my cards, when they slipped out of my gloves again.
Late for gloves, he’d said. And he recognised my school uniform, Normanhurst-I explained, I was in Year 11, which of course led to discussion of whether I would be continuing into Sixth Form. I explained that, with my vocation already set out, it wouldn’t be necessary, but that I’d always thought of becoming a doctor. What I didn’t say was that I’d seen so many untimely dead that I wanted to prevent as many others from crossing to that realm as possible-I do often wonder what might have transpired differently, in the future, if I had ever admitted that to Doctor Jonathan.
He offered himself as a mentor then and there, should I make such a decision to continue my schooling, secure future or none. “Because the only secure future is the one a man builds for himself,” he said then, still with my deck in his hands-such hands!-paging through the minor arcana and righting those that had been inverted when I slipped.
When I went through the deck to sanctify it, later that evening, he’d slipped a business card in there, facing the Knight of Swords, with its back turned to the Page of the same. I still have it, in my wallet. Gilt, of course, like all of him.
II. Ancilla
Cho’s apartment was adjacent to mine, but that never stopped her from being in my own to greet me. I came to think of the place as ‘ours’, as I had so many things between us. She was my twin, my double-for most of our life together, at least in terms of visage, we could pass for one another. Apparently we even shared a fascination with this man.
“So who,” she asked before I’d even shut the door behind me, “is this Doctor Waite character?”
It had been a couple of days, and I’d been so busy I’d nearly put it out of my mind. Instead of explaining the encounter at Paddington, I asked her why. She told me that he’d rang and she’d taken down a message for me and that he had a, well, a swank voice. I didn’t ask her what she’d been doing in my apartment that still afforded her time to take a message for me. She’d probably just thought it was a job call or something.
I digress. But I ended up returning the call that very evening, and agreeing to meet him again under less accidental circumstances. And Cho would come to, and insisted on dressing me. She wanted to be a fashion designer, made a habit of mangling her school uniform in all manner of ways and when out of it, well, I’d swear she bought out the half of Soho that still sold clothing back then, or else they were copying her.
We three agreed to meet at a restaurant on Shaftesbury near Chinatown. The place no longer exists. And just as well-the memory of Cho and Doctor Jonathan meeting and becoming such fast friends is torture enough without the reality to haunt and compound it. She took to calling him Jack, didn’t ask his permission, just did it, like everything else she did. I was referring to him outwardly as “Doctor Waite” at the time, so he insisted that I do the same. I didn’t dare. That conversation ended up consuming more than the meal.
“Atlas, Jack just wants to be friendly with you-don’t you, Jack?”
“Well, I can’t say that’s all I’m after-”
“Oh, you’re a wicked man, Jack.” I believe Cho was flirting with him then, but I was hiding behind the brim of my hat at the time so I can’t be sure. “You’re wicked and it’s boss that you are. Going to grind his bones to make your bread?”
He laughed. It was very much like his smile-boundless and perfect and deep and dark. “But I’m Jack, and he’s the Titan, isn’t he?”
“C’mon, Atlas, give us a ‘fee fie foe fum’!”
I didn’t, of course. I think I’d given up on the hat being able to conceal me and resorted to covering my eyes with my gloves.
But Cho kept at it, going on about “Jack the Giant Killer” and all the other puns Jack was-the significance of his placement of the business card in my deck, I kept to myself-Jack in the Green, Jack-in-the-box, the jack in the wall for a cord, and I think she mentioned a style of dancing that, when described, made my skin burn. Not to mention an euphemism that now I am surprised she didn’t bring up. Gorgeous Golden Jack, she said, to his face. She thought he was very aptly named.
I continued to call him Doctor Waite until the end of the meal.
He cupped me under the chin-I felt so small, and his hand was so powerfully warm-and insisted. “Anything but that. I’d rather not be reminded of our families’ history, young Master Crowley.”
“Doctor Jonathan, then,” I conceded.
He smiled and stoked my cheek. “It will do, Master Atlas. If you must.”
III. Conception
Our families’ history. I should explain.
My great grandfather, great as he was, made many enemies over the course of his life. Among them was another principal occultist of his era, Arthur Edward Waite. My great grandfather found Waite a bore and poseur; Waite found my great grandfather a sensational hedonist, and they both called each other pretender to the arts. When Doctor Jonathan and I became something approaching comfortable discussing the issue many months later, Doctor Jonathan expressed amusement that we’d reversed the vices in this generation-that he, not I, was unrepentantly perverted and that the great grandson of Aleister Crowley was a prude. I thought he was joking.
Around then I actually took to reading the O.T.O. treatises.
I took care to make sure Cho and grandmother never found out. And if Doctor Jonathan did, it was many years later, and through implication, or secondhand knowledge.
IV. Arbiter
”Did you know,” someone said, “that the streets of Covent Garden are paved with the souls of those who spite the Crown?”
“No,” I said, and looked upon him, but remembered nothing but godly height, overpowering maleness.
He neared me, stooped, drew his hand along the cobblestones beneath us. ”No Hell is Hell enough for the likes of them. Better to have them bear up the land they’d tear down, don’t you think?”
I know I stammered something in reply, but don’t know what.
”Listen,” he commanded, touching me. ”You can hear them, can’t you? You can feel them, forcing themselves against the mortar,” and even if I could, all I knew was that his fingers were behind my knee, then at my ankle, one under the cuff of my sock, holding my foot against the street. Compelling me, feel. Feel. In hindsight the irony is more painful than anything. ”And each time the foot of a patriot touches them, it weathers their prisons, shrinks their cages-“
”They don’t deserve it,” I said, weak from his touch. ”No man does.”
He relinquished me, looked me in the eyes. I do not remember the face but know that it changed, then-that he was startled, then intrigued, and then slid his hands up my front to take hold of mine.
He kissed them. They burned.
And he said, ”Let’s have a wager, shall we?”
V. Mentor
People don’t often hurl themselves off the Tower of London. The ravens are supposed to prevent that. They don’t do a very good job of it, or, more precisely, they do as good a job as can be expected.
I’ve had several of these cases over the years, and the first was on 31 March going into 1 April, Nineteen-ninety. They fear that the ghosts will drive the ravens away from the tower and begin the end of the world. And so they send for me, time in, time out, to dispel them and calm the birds.
Doctor Jonathan accompanied me, insisted that he could assist in the drawing and the vigil. His is a subtler magic than mine; while I was laying out my cards, he lit a fag up and kept to the wall. Instead of filtering up into the air the smoke sank, circled me, and before I knew it I was in a banning field with the cards-a strong banning field, nearly invisible, merely smoke. I didn’t dare say anything to him, but I did turn and look; he motioned for me to go on, smiled.
The rite for calling a ghost is a simple one, as long as the ghost doesn’t resist. This one wanted to talk, so it wasn’t as much of a problem. I bound her to the Page of Wands-I’d been told she was an actress-and trapped her there with the fives of Swords and Pentacles. The card shivered and she tried to leave that as well, tried to possess the figure of the Page and beat the frame of the card, but I was able to keep her attention, to talk to her.
Her name was Millie Hartford-Millie, short for Millicent, which she hadn’t thought was a good stage name. She’d come from Scotland to try and break into the cinema industry, or theatre, television, anything. She wasn’t particularly talented and told me she wasn’t particularly pretty either-I was speaking to her-as-the-Page, though, so I can’t confirm it. And she had a run of bad luck, lost her money and her flat, turned to whoring but at least that landed her a supporting role in a play. And the play had gone belly-up because of an obstinate leading actress, right after Millie had called her family for the first time in years to tell them, it worked. So she got drunk, climbed the Tower, and threw herself off it.
I asked her why she continued to haunt it.
“You can’t see the sky in London,” she said. “Not from the streets, and not from my flat, and definitely not from the Underground or the back of a car. No one here looks up. If they won’t look at me, then at least I’ll make them look at where I fell from.”
“That’s awfully arrogant of you,” Doctor Jonathan said.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“No, but the young man’s too kind to have said so.” I looked back, he came forward-he’d finished the first fag and recently lit another, was sliding the lighter back into his coat. “But it won’t make them look up. They’ll look at where you fell and forget where you fell from. The ravens didn’t catch you-they just pecked out your eyes until the coroner took your corpse away.”
She took the Page’s wand and tried to burn the edge of the card. Doctor Jonathan’s smoke filled in the frayed edge and held her, and I pinned the card flat to the stone with my glove.
But I agreed with him. I wouldn’t have said so first but now that he had, I told her, that what she did was selfish and what she was doing, staying behind, was even more selfish than that. I told her that if she wanted to see the sky she could go there, go to where she could. But no. She was afraid that all the things she did in life would condemn her soul to a place where the only sky was fire.
I have several scripted responses to that, I have since the beginning. Then Doctor Jonathan said over my shoulder, “Hell is what you make of it,” and I never used a single one of those stock phrases again.
VI. Liaison
We stayed up there in the Tower overnight. Doctor Jonathan had a sweet tooth, and it was the season for Cadbury Eggs so he’d brought a few packs up. We sat with the ravens, and somehow didn’t scare them off with all the crinkling wrappers, and I thanked him for his help, talked about his family’s magic in contrast to mine. Doctor Jonathan insisted that he was in no way the heir to Waite’s legacy or any exemplar of the art-“a dabbler at best,” he said.
“But thank you,” I told him, “for the banning, I mean-and all your help.”
“It’s my pleasure,” he said. “I’m hardly worthy of my family name when it comes to this-watching someone with real talent work is a treat.”
I insisted that I wasn’t. Or tried, but he cut me off.
“No need for modesty here,” those were the words. And he leaned in closer, offered me another Cadbury egg. “You don’t need to pretend for me and the ravens, do you?”
“I guess not.”
I remember it taking a while to unwrap that egg. That gold was nothing like his, like any of his, not even the frames of his glasses.
And then I asked him, but didn’t look him in the eyes, “And what you said, there…how could you, so calmly?”
He sounded so earnest. “What did I say?”
“She was here because she was afraid of going to Hell, and you told her that she was.”
“Why lie?” he asked.
I said nothing.
I watched; he finished unwrapping his next Cadbury egg and held it between his fingers, stretching that hand out over the Tower’s ledge into the darkness. “When I drop this, it will break,” he said, urging my eyes with his, behind his glasses in shadow and haze. “It will splatter differently depending on what it hits, grass or stone. But no matter what surface it lands on, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t put my chocolate together again, now, can they?”
“No,” I whispered, and bowed my head, and I remember I thought of Millie. That was deliberate, I think. “No, you’re right.”
He drew the Cadbury egg to his lips and kissed the chocolate, held it up in front of his eyes and rotated it like a gem. I could see its reflection in his glasses. “And wouldn’t it be cruel to assure this little egg that its sugary innards won’t be dashed out on the pavement when I pitch it over?”
I sighed. “It would be even less cruel not to throw it at all.”
“You’re so cute, Master Atlas.” It was the first time of many that he would use those exact words. I demurred them then, and every time after.
Instead of tossing the egg over the rail, Doctor Jonathan lowered it to his lips again and took a small bite. White bands of sugar coated his fingertips-gold on white on gold-I tried to look away and couldn’t, can’t now just remembering it, remembering how his tongue darted out to catch it before it dripped too far-remembering how he somehow found my eyes again and asked, “Is this cruel?”
I told him I didn’t know. I think. I mean.
He slid nearer, then…threaded his hand through my hair, his clean hand I mean, the other…the other was bringing the dripping half of the chocolate to my mouth. I parted my lips more to take in breath than to accept what he was offering, but he slipped it in anyway and I outright forgot how to chew or anything. It wasn’t only the taste of the sweet, but the bite of ash and cologne-it paralyzed me like the poison it was.
He withdrew his fingers, after an inquisitive moment, a cock of his head. He’d left the remainder of the chocolate in my mouth, but there was still some of the insides on his fingers, and he licked that off.
I nearly choked.
“Less cruel indeed,” he said, with one last lick through the space between his index finger and thumb. Such hands. Always such hands. “Master Atlas,” he asked, offhandedly, “do you fancy me?”
I bit the chocolate all at once. It burst in my mouth, oversweet.
VII. Reins
In late April, I was called to a hospital to perform a spirit healing. Doctor Jonathan drove me, since the Garden Hospital is all the way out in Hendon-he had a small black van like a cab, with the stickers for his schools and residency on the bumper. Cambridge to the Imperial College, St. Mary’s at Paddington (which does explain why he was there that day), and he was in his last year as a specialist registrar in orthopedics then so I’m not sure precisely how he made so much time for me.
The person who required me was Tessa Hartwick-oddly enough, a girl I’d gone to school with in Somerset before Grandmother pulled me and Cho into homeschooling-for entirely different reasons, mind. The head nurse explained her condition to me-she’d simply been asleep for four months. Her mother had found her one morning and been unable to wake her up for school. Four months-the medical staff had been unable to find anything, and so her mother considered other options, first priests, then me.
We got lost on the way and had to stop for directions. Doctor Jonathan lent me a pen from the glove compartment for that. I forgot to return it because he said he’d just wait downstairs, that it wasn’t a good idea to follow me up to Tess’ room. In hindsight, he was right about a lot, with this case.
I went Within Tess-a transfer of consciousness, I’m not sure I can explain it. She’d built up a horrifying resistance of sound, like childish laughter sped up, coming from all directions. I blocked it with pentacles as best I could, but I also needed those to find her. The Knight of Pentacles wasn’t quite enough, I remember-I latched onto her with it, at last, but it didn’t contain her.
She looked me in the eyes and I told her, “It’s me. Atlas Crowley.”
And she said, “No. No, you’re far too old.”
I thought she was joking. Then again, how could she, at a time like this. “I’ve grown up, that’s all. Like you.”
“But I haven’t grown up,” she said, through the Knight of Pentacles’ mouth.
I couldn’t be anything but confused, at that-she stepped through the frame of the card and I quickly put up whatever was next to contain her-the four of wands. They drove her back into the Knight’s body, but I could see what she meant-it was clear, in the painting’s eyes, but not in her movements, they were a woman’s movements, and the card’s ink strained and burst over her thighs like blood.
“I’m still a girl,” she said. “See? So you can’t be Atlas.”
I asked her what happened. She shouted at me, nothing, nothing at all, in a shrieking voice like the rest of her mind.
“Then why are you sleeping?” I said.
“I guess I’m just tired,” she answered.
I remember remembering-Doctor Jonathan, and all his talk about breaking chocolate eggs.
He was already such a presence in me, you see.
I asked Tess, “What are you tired of?”
She began to cry. Her tears left streaks through the ink, sent curls of steam through the four wands that were holding her in it. I came forward to touch her, to hold her instead-extended my gloves-
She screamed. I’d have expected it, if I was less naïve.
The pen in my pocket exploded. The fire rekindled those four wands, beside me, and I hurt, but not nearly as much as I could have. “Tess, no. Tess, look at me, look at yourself. What’s wrong-”
“He said he’d wait,” she sobbed, choked. “He said he’d wait and he didn’t and I let him.”
I let my arms down. I’m not even sure I understood, back then. “Did you?”
She didn’t answer.
“If you didn’t let him you have to tell someone.”
“I don’t want to. What if they don’t believe me? We were together for months, what if they don’t believe me, what if he-”
“You can’t just run away.”
“-what if he says he didn’t? What if he says I’m lying? I’d rather just not talk at all-not if it’s my fault.”
“But you have to try.” I took up one of the four wands, and it nearly slipped out of my glove-but I held it aside, offered her my free hand. “You do.”
“It could get worse,” she whispered-through the hung head of the Knight of Pentacles, the card’s frame still.
I remember distinctly thinking, Is this less cruel? “It could get better,” I told her, “and it won’t unless you wake up.”
She did, though slowly. But I never learned whether she pressed charges against her boyfriend or not.
VIII. Retribution
“He wants you,” Cho told me.
I didn’t believe her. Not that he didn’t want me-I wasn’t stupid-but I didn’t believe he could want me. Me, I who was nothing compared to him. I who was scrawny and confused and hopeless, clearly not bright enough to be all the things Doctor Jonathan was. But then, wasn’t that just not giving him enough credit? Shouldn’t a man like Doctor Jonathan know precisely what he wants?
I still don’t know.
Cho told me that when she was getting me dressed to meet him at Leicester Square. He wants you. “He’s joking,” I said. “He couldn’t. He’s putting me on.”
She wasn’t the type to let it go, and she didn’t, then, but it was a conversation we’d have so many times that year. How I was so innocent, how I had to think more of myself, how I had to decide if I’d let him get away with being such a perverted man, such an obvious…
That night in Leicester Square was remarkable in a lot of ways. Before-I mentioned, Cho was dressing me-it was the first time I didn’t let her. She had me in something right off Carnaby Street and I-I bucked up and told he that if I was going be seen with Doctor Jonathan I’d rather not be wearing a mesh shirt and oddly-shaped glasses and vinyl. And we almost fought, for a bit, and she rankled me about all of a sudden caring what people thought and I explained, no, it’s not about me, I don’t care what they think of me, I care what they think of him and I don’t want to draw the wrong sort of attention to him. I wanted to look like someone he could present himself with.
Like him, she said. She had this mischief in her eyes…but she understood.
I met him in a suit. Cho redesigned it, of course…and my oxford wasn’t white, Cho wouldn’t have it…but a suit. A suit and a tie and the chain for a pocketwatch but not the watch itself.
He looked almost hungry when he saw me.
IX. Stargazer
“It’s not a law or anything,” I explained to him, “but we don’t do our own readings or turn our own cards. “
He nodded, understanding but still somehow offended. “But there’s nothing against you having your fortune told?”
He seemed almost eager, bounding…I remember recalling that he was, after all, only twenty-five, entitled to be childish, entitled to his quirks. And this seemed to be one of them, this fascination with my work and his hobby-as he presented it, at least. And so I humored him.
The darker alleys off Leicester Square house all manner of things, all manner of people. He didn’t venture too far from the lights-he swung me up the stairs of a place he assured me he’d just passed by once or twice, in the daylight. After he rang the buzzer he looked down at me and smirked over his glasses and asked if I wanted to lay bets on which of our families’ decks this sayer used. I was going to suggest, his, but the door opened too quickly for me to get that out. And besides, I turned out to be wrong.
The sayer was a long-haired, bespectacled man in his middle forties, and not entirely an Englishman by the sheen of his hair-a bluer black than mine. He showed us in, smiling, and referred to us as distinguished clientele. I thought he meant because of the suits. But then he sat us down in these terrifying velvet armchairs and himself at a desk across from us, and he said, “now, which of you is Crowley, and which of you is Waite?”
I glanced at Doctor Jonathan-he looked at me peripherally, through the gap his glasses left. Gold eyes, gold eyelashes… He was waiting for me to speak. I could tell.
“I’m-Crowley,” I said. “If it please you.”
“It surprises me more than pleases me,” the man said, folding his fingers beneath his chin like a spit and leaning on them. “You may call me Reed.” And then he nodded at each of us in turn, “Master Crowley, Mister Waite,” and I was about to correct him, Doctor Waite, but he spoke, again and too soon. “The question is of course whether either of you will believe any of my predictions, give who you are.”
I raised my hand to protest, though I’m not sure what precisely-Doctor Jonathan re-crossed his legs, and met my eyes again briefly. “Then don’t predict, Sir Reed,” he said. “Assess.”
Reed smirked, and I did not like the look of him when he did. “Assess. A reading of state? Of compatibility? Is the reconciliation of your ancestors’ feud nigh so soon?”
“Can it be?” Doctor Jonathan asked him, easily, with his glasses and accents glinting, like his voice.
Reed turned cards that I have never seen, nor think I will see again-neither of our families’ decks, nor the Visconti I use. He fanned them out across the spread of his desk-then gestured to me. “You may think them unsubtle,” Reed warned me, “but so too says a blind man of the dark.”
I nodded-Doctor Jonathan laughed.
“Assessment you shall have,” Reed said. “There are fifty-three, here.” They upturned then, of their own accord, revealing their pattern-trumps all, but no Arcana I had ever seen, and lettered in Chinese-then overturned, and they circled the air around us, an infinity sign around Doctor Jonathan and me, parading steadily. “Ask what you require-no need to do so aloud, I can hear you-and draw of them as you will.”
My head was too much in chaos to articulate a question, even to myself-my hands were sweating in my gloves, and when Doctor Jonathan took my hand in his the leather slid and burned. All inside me was racing; Doctor Jonathan turned to me, lips pursed as if to shush me, and with his other hand he plucked a card from the air.
The image on it was a young lady, similar to the Star in my deck, but nearly symmetrical, with long ropes of bound hair, strangely green, and closed eyes. She bore two planes of glass, circular, at her heart and her brow, carried in invisible hands, and about then I realised Doctor Jonathan had drawn the card inverted.
“Jing dao,” Reed said. “Your perfect answer is, perhaps, too perfect. For the field of human vision does not account for the eye to appreciate its own shape.”
Doctor Jonathan’s hand tightened around my glove, and a chill raced through all the rest of my body, all but that hand and the other curled against the arm of the chair. He returned that card to the intertwined circles around our heads-I stared, at him, at them-and he smiled down at me. “Your turn, Master Atlas,” he said, and pulsed his fingers around mine.
I reached and drew.
I thought that its front was its back. I don’t recall whether it was inverted or not, because I turned it over and around so many times-the design was intricate, and it had a feel very much like the Wheel of Fortune in my Visconti deck, but the picture was even more convoluted, a kaleidoscope of swords and circles and clouds, red where the most convened in the inverse of a flower.
Reed called it, “Huan. ” And he then looked me square in the eyes and corrected, “Huan dao, not that it matters when this card is turned. And if it speaks to delusion or to self-delusion, does it change the answer to your question?”
I didn’t even know what I had asked.
“One more,” he called for, “for the both of you together.” He gestured at our hands-Doctor Jonathan’s enfolding my glove, between the chairs-and with a sudden, slight tautening Doctor Jonathan raised my hand and left it to me to choose. I was red, in the cheeks and under the collars of my oxford, tie, suit-jacket. I hesitated, and then, when heat surged through the gloves (from within, not from his grasp) I found myself selecting the last card. A horrifying, dank chill passed through all those burning places under my skin, starting from those fingertips.
I have not seen the place, nor Reed, since.
To Part 2
.
How Mithy got her groove back, I suppose! Here's that London thing.
Title: The Hanged Man
Fandom: Tokyo Babylon...technically. An AU based on the premise, "what the story of TB would read as, set in London." This can be read as original work, I hope, and I have tagged it as such.
Rating: R, for britishisms, innuendo, understated violence, 90's London fashion, and oxford commas.
Wordcount: 11800. Split in two: Part 2 is here.
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The Hanged Man
tokyo babylon…sort of
Mithrigil Galtirglin
0. Knave
Perhaps there was one fortunate thing about being named “Atlas James Crowley”-namely, that when one’s grandmother or schoolfellows elected to summon me, I’d never be confused for one of the other dozens of Crowleys in the immediate vicinity. I’d hear all three names in succession frequently enough. I was not a troublesome child, no, quite the contrary actually. It’s that my family and associates often forgot I was there. Sometimes I wasn’t, that I’ll give them at least. I wandered, or I’d let my mind wander. And it would wander to the other times I’d wandered.
Horrifying, cyclical thing, really, my mind. For all the time I spend there, I’ve never stopped up all my fear of it.
Parts of it aren’t my own, or weren’t there. I recall an instance (the gaps in which I will later explain) when I was nearly ten years old, when I first came to London. It was the only time in my life I had been apart from my sister (whose name, Alcyone, is equally as unfortunate as mine and so she called herself Cho and everyone let her get away with it) and I’d seen hair like hers on a schoolgirl, walking with her classmates through Covent Garden. Covent Garden…a magnificent place, terrifying to a child as I, already so fearful of himself, to say nothing of the world he lived in. Grasping at that familiarity as I stood beside my grandmother in a city, not just any city but that city-it was instinctive, desperate. And so I slipped from Grandmother’s side and chased the girl.
She was dead. The schoolgirl, not my sister. I could sense it, scurrying after her, tripping over wares, into carts. Such a place, with all the lights of modernity, all the marquees proclaiming things I neither wanted nor understood, and yet, buskers, craftsmen, hawking their simplicity-and underfoot the stones, chips of mortar and dust kicking up around my shoes. The girls did not laugh; they did not notice me. How could they? There were thousands of dead in their world. As many dead there as living here, if not more.
I was ill-was sick, there, in Covent Garden. It was saturated with those dead, painfully, redolently so. That schoolgirl turned and still did not notice me, looked through me the way the living looked through her. She saw another, plainly another, someone taller. She screamed, and I did not hear it, only saw her face contort and her chest burst open. Blood melted through the streets and did not mark the living, consumed by the stone before her corpse could fall. Her eyes were not like mine or my sister’s.
Among the things I am, I am an exorcist; at nearly ten, that year, I had the gift and the will to apply it but lacked the strength. It did not stop me from trying. I called my cards, and I chanted my verse, and I raised my arms to dispel her.
And here is one of the gaps I so feared.
”Did you know,” someone said, ”that the streets of Covent Garden are paved with the souls of those who spite the Crown?”
I. Charlatan
As far as I know, I met Doctor Jonathan Waite at Paddington Underground, on the Ides of March, the year I turned sixteen. Nineteen-ninety. It is nearly painful to consider how long ago that was. How long ago I was. Sixteen, I was still the same height and build as Cho. I’d caught up with her again two years prior, and she groused so often that she’d never cross a meter and a half. So that’s about how tall I was when I crashed into Doctor Jonathan’s chest.
It would serve to describe him. Perhaps then you can comprehend my awe. First, his height-two meters and a hand. I distinctly remember the clip of his tie imprinting itself on my forehead. (I covered it with my hair for two days after.) For all that, he had little girth to him-dense, hard-muscled, and not skinny, but not of a footballer’s size or build. He was golden; his skin, his hair, his eyes. His eyelashes. Even behind his glasses I could see, gold eyelashes. I learned later that his paternal grandmother was from India, though that may have been a lie. Golden, though, so that the rings and cufflinks and pins he wore seemed untarnished, so that the navy of his suit seemed grey.
It was not the first time in my life that I felt envy. I knew later, much later, that it was the first time I felt covetous.
Considering that I had slammed into him hard enough to bruise, I discounted the next few moments as hallucination for several days afterward. He escorted me away from the platform, sat down beside me at a bench, and gave me back the called card I had been chasing. I apologised a thousand times for interrupting him and he insisted, no, my safety was now his primary concern. His voice startled me-deep, invasive. He asked if I minded that he looked me over, insisted, “I’m a physician.”
“Don’t trouble yourself with me, sir-Doctor,” I said.
“They all say that,” he said, and slid aside, put his hand on my forehead. I winced when it touched the bruise. “And then they wind up worse off for not having nipped the problem in the bud. Now look me in the eyes-there, good, no undue dilation. Your name?”
“-Crowley. Atlas Crowley.”
He smiled. It was silver, against all the gold. “With a name like that, are you sure you don’t have a concussion?”
I laughed, and it hurt my head. “I’m named for the star, not the titan the star’s named for.”
“Well, I can see that.” His eyes narrowed on mine, his glasses closer, close enough to whiten briefly. I remember that when he commented, “Or I could, if your eyes weren’t so captivating,” I couldn’t see his at all. He slid an arm under mine to hoist me up-I gripped it in my gloves. “Let’s get you somewhere a little less noisy, shall we?”
The rest is not a gap but a blur, a series of seemingly inconsequential conversations that I am sure, if I recalled in full, would haunt me more potently than their absence. We did find someplace less loud, outside, overlooking Bishop’s Bridge but not quite on it. I explained so much of myself, sorted my cards-he remarked, as so many have, that I must be a descendent of that Crowley, a fact to which I admitted accepted uncertainty. “Grandmother insists it,” I told him, “enough that she married a man who claimed the same.” He admitted to turning a few fortunes of his own-and he ordered my cards, when they slipped out of my gloves again.
Late for gloves, he’d said. And he recognised my school uniform, Normanhurst-I explained, I was in Year 11, which of course led to discussion of whether I would be continuing into Sixth Form. I explained that, with my vocation already set out, it wouldn’t be necessary, but that I’d always thought of becoming a doctor. What I didn’t say was that I’d seen so many untimely dead that I wanted to prevent as many others from crossing to that realm as possible-I do often wonder what might have transpired differently, in the future, if I had ever admitted that to Doctor Jonathan.
He offered himself as a mentor then and there, should I make such a decision to continue my schooling, secure future or none. “Because the only secure future is the one a man builds for himself,” he said then, still with my deck in his hands-such hands!-paging through the minor arcana and righting those that had been inverted when I slipped.
When I went through the deck to sanctify it, later that evening, he’d slipped a business card in there, facing the Knight of Swords, with its back turned to the Page of the same. I still have it, in my wallet. Gilt, of course, like all of him.
II. Ancilla
Cho’s apartment was adjacent to mine, but that never stopped her from being in my own to greet me. I came to think of the place as ‘ours’, as I had so many things between us. She was my twin, my double-for most of our life together, at least in terms of visage, we could pass for one another. Apparently we even shared a fascination with this man.
“So who,” she asked before I’d even shut the door behind me, “is this Doctor Waite character?”
It had been a couple of days, and I’d been so busy I’d nearly put it out of my mind. Instead of explaining the encounter at Paddington, I asked her why. She told me that he’d rang and she’d taken down a message for me and that he had a, well, a swank voice. I didn’t ask her what she’d been doing in my apartment that still afforded her time to take a message for me. She’d probably just thought it was a job call or something.
I digress. But I ended up returning the call that very evening, and agreeing to meet him again under less accidental circumstances. And Cho would come to, and insisted on dressing me. She wanted to be a fashion designer, made a habit of mangling her school uniform in all manner of ways and when out of it, well, I’d swear she bought out the half of Soho that still sold clothing back then, or else they were copying her.
We three agreed to meet at a restaurant on Shaftesbury near Chinatown. The place no longer exists. And just as well-the memory of Cho and Doctor Jonathan meeting and becoming such fast friends is torture enough without the reality to haunt and compound it. She took to calling him Jack, didn’t ask his permission, just did it, like everything else she did. I was referring to him outwardly as “Doctor Waite” at the time, so he insisted that I do the same. I didn’t dare. That conversation ended up consuming more than the meal.
“Atlas, Jack just wants to be friendly with you-don’t you, Jack?”
“Well, I can’t say that’s all I’m after-”
“Oh, you’re a wicked man, Jack.” I believe Cho was flirting with him then, but I was hiding behind the brim of my hat at the time so I can’t be sure. “You’re wicked and it’s boss that you are. Going to grind his bones to make your bread?”
He laughed. It was very much like his smile-boundless and perfect and deep and dark. “But I’m Jack, and he’s the Titan, isn’t he?”
“C’mon, Atlas, give us a ‘fee fie foe fum’!”
I didn’t, of course. I think I’d given up on the hat being able to conceal me and resorted to covering my eyes with my gloves.
But Cho kept at it, going on about “Jack the Giant Killer” and all the other puns Jack was-the significance of his placement of the business card in my deck, I kept to myself-Jack in the Green, Jack-in-the-box, the jack in the wall for a cord, and I think she mentioned a style of dancing that, when described, made my skin burn. Not to mention an euphemism that now I am surprised she didn’t bring up. Gorgeous Golden Jack, she said, to his face. She thought he was very aptly named.
I continued to call him Doctor Waite until the end of the meal.
He cupped me under the chin-I felt so small, and his hand was so powerfully warm-and insisted. “Anything but that. I’d rather not be reminded of our families’ history, young Master Crowley.”
“Doctor Jonathan, then,” I conceded.
He smiled and stoked my cheek. “It will do, Master Atlas. If you must.”
III. Conception
Our families’ history. I should explain.
My great grandfather, great as he was, made many enemies over the course of his life. Among them was another principal occultist of his era, Arthur Edward Waite. My great grandfather found Waite a bore and poseur; Waite found my great grandfather a sensational hedonist, and they both called each other pretender to the arts. When Doctor Jonathan and I became something approaching comfortable discussing the issue many months later, Doctor Jonathan expressed amusement that we’d reversed the vices in this generation-that he, not I, was unrepentantly perverted and that the great grandson of Aleister Crowley was a prude. I thought he was joking.
Around then I actually took to reading the O.T.O. treatises.
I took care to make sure Cho and grandmother never found out. And if Doctor Jonathan did, it was many years later, and through implication, or secondhand knowledge.
IV. Arbiter
”Did you know,” someone said, “that the streets of Covent Garden are paved with the souls of those who spite the Crown?”
“No,” I said, and looked upon him, but remembered nothing but godly height, overpowering maleness.
He neared me, stooped, drew his hand along the cobblestones beneath us. ”No Hell is Hell enough for the likes of them. Better to have them bear up the land they’d tear down, don’t you think?”
I know I stammered something in reply, but don’t know what.
”Listen,” he commanded, touching me. ”You can hear them, can’t you? You can feel them, forcing themselves against the mortar,” and even if I could, all I knew was that his fingers were behind my knee, then at my ankle, one under the cuff of my sock, holding my foot against the street. Compelling me, feel. Feel. In hindsight the irony is more painful than anything. ”And each time the foot of a patriot touches them, it weathers their prisons, shrinks their cages-“
”They don’t deserve it,” I said, weak from his touch. ”No man does.”
He relinquished me, looked me in the eyes. I do not remember the face but know that it changed, then-that he was startled, then intrigued, and then slid his hands up my front to take hold of mine.
He kissed them. They burned.
And he said, ”Let’s have a wager, shall we?”
V. Mentor
People don’t often hurl themselves off the Tower of London. The ravens are supposed to prevent that. They don’t do a very good job of it, or, more precisely, they do as good a job as can be expected.
I’ve had several of these cases over the years, and the first was on 31 March going into 1 April, Nineteen-ninety. They fear that the ghosts will drive the ravens away from the tower and begin the end of the world. And so they send for me, time in, time out, to dispel them and calm the birds.
Doctor Jonathan accompanied me, insisted that he could assist in the drawing and the vigil. His is a subtler magic than mine; while I was laying out my cards, he lit a fag up and kept to the wall. Instead of filtering up into the air the smoke sank, circled me, and before I knew it I was in a banning field with the cards-a strong banning field, nearly invisible, merely smoke. I didn’t dare say anything to him, but I did turn and look; he motioned for me to go on, smiled.
The rite for calling a ghost is a simple one, as long as the ghost doesn’t resist. This one wanted to talk, so it wasn’t as much of a problem. I bound her to the Page of Wands-I’d been told she was an actress-and trapped her there with the fives of Swords and Pentacles. The card shivered and she tried to leave that as well, tried to possess the figure of the Page and beat the frame of the card, but I was able to keep her attention, to talk to her.
Her name was Millie Hartford-Millie, short for Millicent, which she hadn’t thought was a good stage name. She’d come from Scotland to try and break into the cinema industry, or theatre, television, anything. She wasn’t particularly talented and told me she wasn’t particularly pretty either-I was speaking to her-as-the-Page, though, so I can’t confirm it. And she had a run of bad luck, lost her money and her flat, turned to whoring but at least that landed her a supporting role in a play. And the play had gone belly-up because of an obstinate leading actress, right after Millie had called her family for the first time in years to tell them, it worked. So she got drunk, climbed the Tower, and threw herself off it.
I asked her why she continued to haunt it.
“You can’t see the sky in London,” she said. “Not from the streets, and not from my flat, and definitely not from the Underground or the back of a car. No one here looks up. If they won’t look at me, then at least I’ll make them look at where I fell from.”
“That’s awfully arrogant of you,” Doctor Jonathan said.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“No, but the young man’s too kind to have said so.” I looked back, he came forward-he’d finished the first fag and recently lit another, was sliding the lighter back into his coat. “But it won’t make them look up. They’ll look at where you fell and forget where you fell from. The ravens didn’t catch you-they just pecked out your eyes until the coroner took your corpse away.”
She took the Page’s wand and tried to burn the edge of the card. Doctor Jonathan’s smoke filled in the frayed edge and held her, and I pinned the card flat to the stone with my glove.
But I agreed with him. I wouldn’t have said so first but now that he had, I told her, that what she did was selfish and what she was doing, staying behind, was even more selfish than that. I told her that if she wanted to see the sky she could go there, go to where she could. But no. She was afraid that all the things she did in life would condemn her soul to a place where the only sky was fire.
I have several scripted responses to that, I have since the beginning. Then Doctor Jonathan said over my shoulder, “Hell is what you make of it,” and I never used a single one of those stock phrases again.
VI. Liaison
We stayed up there in the Tower overnight. Doctor Jonathan had a sweet tooth, and it was the season for Cadbury Eggs so he’d brought a few packs up. We sat with the ravens, and somehow didn’t scare them off with all the crinkling wrappers, and I thanked him for his help, talked about his family’s magic in contrast to mine. Doctor Jonathan insisted that he was in no way the heir to Waite’s legacy or any exemplar of the art-“a dabbler at best,” he said.
“But thank you,” I told him, “for the banning, I mean-and all your help.”
“It’s my pleasure,” he said. “I’m hardly worthy of my family name when it comes to this-watching someone with real talent work is a treat.”
I insisted that I wasn’t. Or tried, but he cut me off.
“No need for modesty here,” those were the words. And he leaned in closer, offered me another Cadbury egg. “You don’t need to pretend for me and the ravens, do you?”
“I guess not.”
I remember it taking a while to unwrap that egg. That gold was nothing like his, like any of his, not even the frames of his glasses.
And then I asked him, but didn’t look him in the eyes, “And what you said, there…how could you, so calmly?”
He sounded so earnest. “What did I say?”
“She was here because she was afraid of going to Hell, and you told her that she was.”
“Why lie?” he asked.
I said nothing.
I watched; he finished unwrapping his next Cadbury egg and held it between his fingers, stretching that hand out over the Tower’s ledge into the darkness. “When I drop this, it will break,” he said, urging my eyes with his, behind his glasses in shadow and haze. “It will splatter differently depending on what it hits, grass or stone. But no matter what surface it lands on, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t put my chocolate together again, now, can they?”
“No,” I whispered, and bowed my head, and I remember I thought of Millie. That was deliberate, I think. “No, you’re right.”
He drew the Cadbury egg to his lips and kissed the chocolate, held it up in front of his eyes and rotated it like a gem. I could see its reflection in his glasses. “And wouldn’t it be cruel to assure this little egg that its sugary innards won’t be dashed out on the pavement when I pitch it over?”
I sighed. “It would be even less cruel not to throw it at all.”
“You’re so cute, Master Atlas.” It was the first time of many that he would use those exact words. I demurred them then, and every time after.
Instead of tossing the egg over the rail, Doctor Jonathan lowered it to his lips again and took a small bite. White bands of sugar coated his fingertips-gold on white on gold-I tried to look away and couldn’t, can’t now just remembering it, remembering how his tongue darted out to catch it before it dripped too far-remembering how he somehow found my eyes again and asked, “Is this cruel?”
I told him I didn’t know. I think. I mean.
He slid nearer, then…threaded his hand through my hair, his clean hand I mean, the other…the other was bringing the dripping half of the chocolate to my mouth. I parted my lips more to take in breath than to accept what he was offering, but he slipped it in anyway and I outright forgot how to chew or anything. It wasn’t only the taste of the sweet, but the bite of ash and cologne-it paralyzed me like the poison it was.
He withdrew his fingers, after an inquisitive moment, a cock of his head. He’d left the remainder of the chocolate in my mouth, but there was still some of the insides on his fingers, and he licked that off.
I nearly choked.
“Less cruel indeed,” he said, with one last lick through the space between his index finger and thumb. Such hands. Always such hands. “Master Atlas,” he asked, offhandedly, “do you fancy me?”
I bit the chocolate all at once. It burst in my mouth, oversweet.
VII. Reins
In late April, I was called to a hospital to perform a spirit healing. Doctor Jonathan drove me, since the Garden Hospital is all the way out in Hendon-he had a small black van like a cab, with the stickers for his schools and residency on the bumper. Cambridge to the Imperial College, St. Mary’s at Paddington (which does explain why he was there that day), and he was in his last year as a specialist registrar in orthopedics then so I’m not sure precisely how he made so much time for me.
The person who required me was Tessa Hartwick-oddly enough, a girl I’d gone to school with in Somerset before Grandmother pulled me and Cho into homeschooling-for entirely different reasons, mind. The head nurse explained her condition to me-she’d simply been asleep for four months. Her mother had found her one morning and been unable to wake her up for school. Four months-the medical staff had been unable to find anything, and so her mother considered other options, first priests, then me.
We got lost on the way and had to stop for directions. Doctor Jonathan lent me a pen from the glove compartment for that. I forgot to return it because he said he’d just wait downstairs, that it wasn’t a good idea to follow me up to Tess’ room. In hindsight, he was right about a lot, with this case.
I went Within Tess-a transfer of consciousness, I’m not sure I can explain it. She’d built up a horrifying resistance of sound, like childish laughter sped up, coming from all directions. I blocked it with pentacles as best I could, but I also needed those to find her. The Knight of Pentacles wasn’t quite enough, I remember-I latched onto her with it, at last, but it didn’t contain her.
She looked me in the eyes and I told her, “It’s me. Atlas Crowley.”
And she said, “No. No, you’re far too old.”
I thought she was joking. Then again, how could she, at a time like this. “I’ve grown up, that’s all. Like you.”
“But I haven’t grown up,” she said, through the Knight of Pentacles’ mouth.
I couldn’t be anything but confused, at that-she stepped through the frame of the card and I quickly put up whatever was next to contain her-the four of wands. They drove her back into the Knight’s body, but I could see what she meant-it was clear, in the painting’s eyes, but not in her movements, they were a woman’s movements, and the card’s ink strained and burst over her thighs like blood.
“I’m still a girl,” she said. “See? So you can’t be Atlas.”
I asked her what happened. She shouted at me, nothing, nothing at all, in a shrieking voice like the rest of her mind.
“Then why are you sleeping?” I said.
“I guess I’m just tired,” she answered.
I remember remembering-Doctor Jonathan, and all his talk about breaking chocolate eggs.
He was already such a presence in me, you see.
I asked Tess, “What are you tired of?”
She began to cry. Her tears left streaks through the ink, sent curls of steam through the four wands that were holding her in it. I came forward to touch her, to hold her instead-extended my gloves-
She screamed. I’d have expected it, if I was less naïve.
The pen in my pocket exploded. The fire rekindled those four wands, beside me, and I hurt, but not nearly as much as I could have. “Tess, no. Tess, look at me, look at yourself. What’s wrong-”
“He said he’d wait,” she sobbed, choked. “He said he’d wait and he didn’t and I let him.”
I let my arms down. I’m not even sure I understood, back then. “Did you?”
She didn’t answer.
“If you didn’t let him you have to tell someone.”
“I don’t want to. What if they don’t believe me? We were together for months, what if they don’t believe me, what if he-”
“You can’t just run away.”
“-what if he says he didn’t? What if he says I’m lying? I’d rather just not talk at all-not if it’s my fault.”
“But you have to try.” I took up one of the four wands, and it nearly slipped out of my glove-but I held it aside, offered her my free hand. “You do.”
“It could get worse,” she whispered-through the hung head of the Knight of Pentacles, the card’s frame still.
I remember distinctly thinking, Is this less cruel? “It could get better,” I told her, “and it won’t unless you wake up.”
She did, though slowly. But I never learned whether she pressed charges against her boyfriend or not.
VIII. Retribution
“He wants you,” Cho told me.
I didn’t believe her. Not that he didn’t want me-I wasn’t stupid-but I didn’t believe he could want me. Me, I who was nothing compared to him. I who was scrawny and confused and hopeless, clearly not bright enough to be all the things Doctor Jonathan was. But then, wasn’t that just not giving him enough credit? Shouldn’t a man like Doctor Jonathan know precisely what he wants?
I still don’t know.
Cho told me that when she was getting me dressed to meet him at Leicester Square. He wants you. “He’s joking,” I said. “He couldn’t. He’s putting me on.”
She wasn’t the type to let it go, and she didn’t, then, but it was a conversation we’d have so many times that year. How I was so innocent, how I had to think more of myself, how I had to decide if I’d let him get away with being such a perverted man, such an obvious…
That night in Leicester Square was remarkable in a lot of ways. Before-I mentioned, Cho was dressing me-it was the first time I didn’t let her. She had me in something right off Carnaby Street and I-I bucked up and told he that if I was going be seen with Doctor Jonathan I’d rather not be wearing a mesh shirt and oddly-shaped glasses and vinyl. And we almost fought, for a bit, and she rankled me about all of a sudden caring what people thought and I explained, no, it’s not about me, I don’t care what they think of me, I care what they think of him and I don’t want to draw the wrong sort of attention to him. I wanted to look like someone he could present himself with.
Like him, she said. She had this mischief in her eyes…but she understood.
I met him in a suit. Cho redesigned it, of course…and my oxford wasn’t white, Cho wouldn’t have it…but a suit. A suit and a tie and the chain for a pocketwatch but not the watch itself.
He looked almost hungry when he saw me.
IX. Stargazer
“It’s not a law or anything,” I explained to him, “but we don’t do our own readings or turn our own cards. “
He nodded, understanding but still somehow offended. “But there’s nothing against you having your fortune told?”
He seemed almost eager, bounding…I remember recalling that he was, after all, only twenty-five, entitled to be childish, entitled to his quirks. And this seemed to be one of them, this fascination with my work and his hobby-as he presented it, at least. And so I humored him.
The darker alleys off Leicester Square house all manner of things, all manner of people. He didn’t venture too far from the lights-he swung me up the stairs of a place he assured me he’d just passed by once or twice, in the daylight. After he rang the buzzer he looked down at me and smirked over his glasses and asked if I wanted to lay bets on which of our families’ decks this sayer used. I was going to suggest, his, but the door opened too quickly for me to get that out. And besides, I turned out to be wrong.
The sayer was a long-haired, bespectacled man in his middle forties, and not entirely an Englishman by the sheen of his hair-a bluer black than mine. He showed us in, smiling, and referred to us as distinguished clientele. I thought he meant because of the suits. But then he sat us down in these terrifying velvet armchairs and himself at a desk across from us, and he said, “now, which of you is Crowley, and which of you is Waite?”
I glanced at Doctor Jonathan-he looked at me peripherally, through the gap his glasses left. Gold eyes, gold eyelashes… He was waiting for me to speak. I could tell.
“I’m-Crowley,” I said. “If it please you.”
“It surprises me more than pleases me,” the man said, folding his fingers beneath his chin like a spit and leaning on them. “You may call me Reed.” And then he nodded at each of us in turn, “Master Crowley, Mister Waite,” and I was about to correct him, Doctor Waite, but he spoke, again and too soon. “The question is of course whether either of you will believe any of my predictions, give who you are.”
I raised my hand to protest, though I’m not sure what precisely-Doctor Jonathan re-crossed his legs, and met my eyes again briefly. “Then don’t predict, Sir Reed,” he said. “Assess.”
Reed smirked, and I did not like the look of him when he did. “Assess. A reading of state? Of compatibility? Is the reconciliation of your ancestors’ feud nigh so soon?”
“Can it be?” Doctor Jonathan asked him, easily, with his glasses and accents glinting, like his voice.
Reed turned cards that I have never seen, nor think I will see again-neither of our families’ decks, nor the Visconti I use. He fanned them out across the spread of his desk-then gestured to me. “You may think them unsubtle,” Reed warned me, “but so too says a blind man of the dark.”
I nodded-Doctor Jonathan laughed.
“Assessment you shall have,” Reed said. “There are fifty-three, here.” They upturned then, of their own accord, revealing their pattern-trumps all, but no Arcana I had ever seen, and lettered in Chinese-then overturned, and they circled the air around us, an infinity sign around Doctor Jonathan and me, parading steadily. “Ask what you require-no need to do so aloud, I can hear you-and draw of them as you will.”
My head was too much in chaos to articulate a question, even to myself-my hands were sweating in my gloves, and when Doctor Jonathan took my hand in his the leather slid and burned. All inside me was racing; Doctor Jonathan turned to me, lips pursed as if to shush me, and with his other hand he plucked a card from the air.
The image on it was a young lady, similar to the Star in my deck, but nearly symmetrical, with long ropes of bound hair, strangely green, and closed eyes. She bore two planes of glass, circular, at her heart and her brow, carried in invisible hands, and about then I realised Doctor Jonathan had drawn the card inverted.
“Jing dao,” Reed said. “Your perfect answer is, perhaps, too perfect. For the field of human vision does not account for the eye to appreciate its own shape.”
Doctor Jonathan’s hand tightened around my glove, and a chill raced through all the rest of my body, all but that hand and the other curled against the arm of the chair. He returned that card to the intertwined circles around our heads-I stared, at him, at them-and he smiled down at me. “Your turn, Master Atlas,” he said, and pulsed his fingers around mine.
I reached and drew.
I thought that its front was its back. I don’t recall whether it was inverted or not, because I turned it over and around so many times-the design was intricate, and it had a feel very much like the Wheel of Fortune in my Visconti deck, but the picture was even more convoluted, a kaleidoscope of swords and circles and clouds, red where the most convened in the inverse of a flower.
Reed called it, “Huan. ” And he then looked me square in the eyes and corrected, “Huan dao, not that it matters when this card is turned. And if it speaks to delusion or to self-delusion, does it change the answer to your question?”
I didn’t even know what I had asked.
“One more,” he called for, “for the both of you together.” He gestured at our hands-Doctor Jonathan’s enfolding my glove, between the chairs-and with a sudden, slight tautening Doctor Jonathan raised my hand and left it to me to choose. I was red, in the cheeks and under the collars of my oxford, tie, suit-jacket. I hesitated, and then, when heat surged through the gloves (from within, not from his grasp) I found myself selecting the last card. A horrifying, dank chill passed through all those burning places under my skin, starting from those fingertips.
I have not seen the place, nor Reed, since.
To Part 2
.