The Love of the Dead.

by Craig Saunders.

July 2012.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

The Book of Lies.

Aleister Crowley.

High priest the mesmorous, the soul auctioneer, Sells scorpion tightropes, while surfing on fear "Soul Auctioneer"

Death in Vegas.

Shimmy on down baby.

Shimmy on down.

"Troubled Times"

Screaming Trees.

Part One.

The High Priestess.

Chapter One.

Monday 10th November.

Some time after the killing started, some time before it ended, Beth Willis sat at her kitchen table with a glass of whiskey. Beth needed a focus for meditation and preferred a whiskey tumbler. It worked best if it was full to begin with, empty later on.

She stared at the still liquid, her brow drawn tight, cross, but not really knowing why. What was the point at being angry with the dead?

She didn't want to meditate, but spirits were demanding bastards.

It didn't matter that this was stupid. It didn't matter that she was probably wasting her time, or that her son had kept her up playing the Xbox long after last night's binge should have put her to sleep.

Breathe out, breathe in. Relax. Let calm wash over her.

Damn, she wanted to drink it. Focus on that. Let it go where it will.

The theory behind meditation was easy enough. Some people counted. Others focused on a candle flame and said "Om" while their legs went numb from twisting into stupid positions. Meditation was supposed to be comfortable, but she had a hangover and was liable to fall asleep. So she sat.

Theory was fine, but above all, don't fight it.

She had a kind of a guide who she spoke to. Most of the time that she got a message, it came from him. She didn't often sit and stare at nothing like she was pretending to be Yoda, way back when her son had been into Star Wars and not Lara Crofta"the Angelina Jolie version, not some pixelated bimbo.

But this call hadn't come from her guide. This was straight up lightning. You couldn't fight that no matter how you tried. You can't catch lightning.

Breathe. Watch the liquid.

Breathe.

It was no use, she thought, but then she was staring slack-jawed at the ceiling. A stringy cobweb dangled from the medallion and swayed in the draft from the rattling windows. She didn't really see it; her kitchen didn't exist for her anymore. She could have been dreaming, but for her eyes being open, staring into space, seeing beyond the four walls. Seeing a man's house. An unfamiliar house but it didn't shock her. It was just somewhere else to be. Interesting, perhaps, but just another house.

There was a dresser against a wall. A short thing. Maybe it was called a sideboard. She didn't know. A candle burned within a glass tube. The tube was red. The room took on a ruby glow that should have been soothing, but then the man's hands came into view. It didn't seem soothing anymore. It looked like blood.

The man flicked cards. Tarot. Rider-Waite cards. Just like the ones she used.

They weren't his cards. They were the victim's.

Flick, and the card flew through the air onto a table she didn't see. Just the cards. They started face down but landed face up.

The Tower, flames licking the upper windows. The Tower, and a man and a woman falling, robes and dresses fluttering as they plummeted to their deaths. The Tower, a storm on a black night. Lightning crashed.

Over and over the cards landed, though there was only one Tower card in the deck.

The man's hands were strong, nails clipped short, no scars. The backs of his hands were covered with thick black hair. Deft hands. But these weren't healing hands. They were a killer's.

Steady and perfect. Building a tower of cards. Building a tower, but the tower wasn't about building. The TOWER, the card said. The sixteenth card of the major arcana.

It wasn't about building at all. It was about falling, burning, destruction.

The ends of things. Of lives.

As hard as it came, the vision fled. She fell forward so hard she cracked her favorite glass with her forehead. She watched, numbed, as blood dripped and mingled with the spilled whiskey on the tablecloth.

Her heart pounded and she was panting like she'd run half a mile. She didn't scare easily, but seeing a killer making a house of cards like that, a vision so powerful...she didn't know what it meant but it was bad medicine and she didn't want any of it.

"But you've got it, Beth. And you know damn well what it means."

Spirits had called her out. Guides didn't do that for no reason. She might not know the whys of it, but she knew who the hands belonged to.

He'd been in the paper every day for the last three weeks.

She stumbled on the way into the hall, holding pressure to the cut on her forehead. She'd knocked herself a pretty good one, but she could still see straight enough to read the phone book.

She dialed the police, got the usual run around. Finally, she made it through to the local station. A detective named Coleridge picked up and by the time she'd finished talking with him, her night was well on the way to turning to shit.

Chapter Two.

"Coleridge," he said in a big man's gruff voice.

"Hello?"

"Ma'am?"

She took a deep breath and dove right in, just like when you take a plunge into the cold sea, no preparation, only blind forward momentum.

"I've been trying to tell someone about a...a vision I had. About the killer in the paper."

She felt like a fraud all over again.

"Let's run thought it, okay? You want to give me what you've got?"

"I've never done this before."

"Anything that's useful, we use. We don't talk about it, but we often have calls from mediums. Just give me what you've got and don't worry. I'll be straight with you. I don't believe in God, but just because I don't believe in something don't mean it isn't real. So you don't mind what other people think and tell me what you know."

Just like that. No bullshit. Straight up. She was flustered, even though she'd been giving people messages from the dead most of her life.

"Just a picture, really. A Tarot card. Well, a deck of Tarot cards, but one in particular."

"Go on."

"You know Tarot?"

"If you would, ma'am," he said, and she got the impression that he knew well enough what she was going to say.

"The Tower, Detective. That's what I saw. That's it."

When he spoke again his voice was different. Softer.

"Thank you. That's very helpful. Nothing else?"

Nothing else? Nothing else, Beth? But she couldn't say what else, because it was insane and she was already telling a policeman that she had visions.

"No, just that."

"Can I ask, what made you call us?"

"I see the papers. I know about the killings. Detective Coleridge, I knew two of the people who were murdered. I just know it's got something to do with them. Something to do with Tarot, maybe. They're mediums, right? It just made sense. I know it's relevant. I just don't know why yet."

He didn't say anything for a while. Thinking. She could hear him breathing. Labored breath, like a fat man.

"Ma'am," he said eventually. "Give me your contact information. If we get anything else, I'd like to be able to call you. If that's okay."

She agreed without thinking it through. She had many failings. Most she knew. Some she forgot, like expecting strangers to believe her visions were the truth.

"Yes," she said, because the damage was done. She wasn't just some crackpot woman living in a little cottage by the sea or simply the embarrassing town drunk anymore.

She hadn't thought it fully through. She never did.

Now, she was involved.

Chapter Three.

After she made the phone call, Beth pulled on her coat and took some money from the bread box.

"Miles! I'm going into town! Don't break anything!"

Nothing.

Whatever.

She pulled on a coat and stepped outside onto the walkway, half buried in sand. She'd stopped brushing it off the flagstones because it always blew back. She'd given up most of the house maintenance. A fresh coat of paint on the door the previous year had been about the last thing she'd done that hadn't been essential.

The ocean took its toll. Storms rolled in off the North Sea, bringing hard and bitter winds. The salt air cracked paint and brick and wood alike. The gutters rusted, tiles flew off. But her two-bedroom cottage would prevail, as it had for decades.

The sea was at high tide, a hundred yards or so from her home. It came as close as fifty when there was a big swell, but never to her front door with its new coat of paint. She hoped it never would.

Sand crunched under her feet, coarse and full of sharp bits of crushed shells. The going grew easier once she reached the road. In summer the road would be dangerous to walk on, too, because of the traffic. The Norfolk coast was heaven in the winter, hell in the summer. Hell wasn't other people, only tourists.

A couple of cars passed, but she stepped from the road into the sand and let them go. The town sign rattled in the wind. A bird drifted on a gust, not flapping, just hanging there, suspended on the icy rush. Some kind of black bird, maybe a crow or a raven. Out of place by the sea. She watched it until it sank from sight behind the big warehouses on the edge of town. Ugly structures, all gray metal. The sidings rattled in a high wind, sometimes loud enough for her to hear even though she was the better part of a mile from town.

There were a few small traffic circles, but crossing them was pretty easy now that the weather had cooled and the tourists had left. The nearest shop was on Cliff View, a street that ran dangerously along the side of a steep hill. Nice view from the houses there, but they weren't worth a penny and were probably only a decade away from falling into the sea.

She picked up a loaf of bread, a can of beans, a bottle of whiskey, and a pack of cigarettes. It cost her almost twenty quid.

"How are you, Beth?" asked Jean from her perch behind the counter.

"I'm all right. Getting cold."