He looked down at his clothes and they were covered with dust and clods of dirt. He no longer wore the jeans, blue shirt, and black leather vest that he’d been wearing since coming west. His clothes were his old cavalry blues. The dirty-shirt blue he’d worn into battle against the Confederates back when he was a young man, barely out of his teens.
His hands, though, were not the hands of a callow youth. They were not the hands he saw every day now, either. They were thin and wasted. The hands of an old, old man.
Or the hands of something else.
Something from which all vitality, all of the juices of life, had been leeched away.
“Pick a card,” said Mircalla once more. “Any card.”
“I…”
“Go on. They won’t bite.”
She laughed, and it was a grating sound. Like a knife blade dragged across wet glass.
He recoiled from the sound, but even as he did so his withered hand reached out to take a card. It slid from between the others with a soft hiss.
“Turn it over,” she said. “Show me.”
He turned it over.
It was a tarot.
It was the death card.
Exactly the card he expected it to be.
But Mircalla made a sound of disgust and annoyance. She picked up the card, regarded it for a moment, and then flicked it away into the wind. The card swirled in a circle for a moment and then vanished.
“Not that card,” she said.
“Why? It’s mine.”
“You need to pick a new card,” she said. “That one’s been used already.”
“I don’t understand.”
She laughed again. “Of course you don’t. Pick another card. Pick one that matters to your future.”
“My future? But the death card…”
“Has already been played. Don’t you know that?” She shook her head. “No, you don’t know it. I can see it in your face. You think you only dream about the dead. You think they’re ghosts of a guilty conscience.”
“They are—”
“Of course they’re not,” snapped Mircalla. “The dead follow you everywhere you go. You know it on a level too deep for your stupid mortal mind to realize, but it’s why you always move on. It’s why you’re never content to stay anywhere. It’s why you don’t have friends. Not living ones, anyway.” She paused. “It’s why you don’t love.”
“I loved someone once…”
“And she follows you, too, Greyson Torrance. Your Annabelle Sampson shambles along with the rest of them.”
“No!”
“Just because you don’t see her doesn’t mean that she isn’t there.” Mircalla cocked her head to one side. “You never even look for her, do you?”
“She’s buried in Pennsylvania. I dug her grave. I was there when they spoke the words over her to send her soul to heaven.”
Mircalla threw her head back and laughed.
“Heaven? Heaven? Is that where you think the dead go? To heaven to play harps and bask in the glory of an eternal God. Oh… mortal man, you are such a fool. Like so many men I have known. Like so many men who still walk this earth. You go about with your guns and your strength and your certainty that the world is what you judge it to be, and all the time the world moves in different gears. You think you understand how the clockwork of the world operates, but you don’t. You’re like monkeys staring at a fine watch and thinking it’s magic made just for you.”
She turned, lifted the hem of her veil and spat into the dust. For a brief moment he saw her naked flesh. Chin and cheek and lips. And he recoiled from what he saw. They were not the smooth features of a beautiful woman. What he saw was withered and cracked, mottled like the skin of some ancient mummy. Mircalla dropped the veil and turned back to him.
“You do not understand the world because you are afraid to know its truths,” she said. “Like so many men.”
“You’re not making sense,” he protested.
“No? Turn and look.” She gestured to the east and he turned with great reluctance. There, in the direction from which the cold wind blew, there were people. A mass of them, shuffling along, moving slowly. Pale faces and empty eyes.
He knew them.
He knew them so well. And she was there. Annabelle. With her torn dress and broken fingernails. Annabelle.
Oh God, Annabelle.
“This is a dream,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “This is a dream. But they are not.”
“What?”
“The dead follow you, Grey Torrance. They have followed you since you caused their deaths, and they will follow you until you have nowhere else to run. And then they will claim you as one of their own. That is the truth of it. It is the truth you have been running from.”
“That’s madness,” he snapped. “You’re a witch and a whore and you drugged me. You slipped something into my beer.”
He remembered the pain in his neck and touched the spot. His fingers came away slick with fresh blood.
“You sicced something on me. A snake or a…”
“My sisters tasted you, mortal man,” admitted Mircalla, “and they wanted to drink deep of you. You may be damned and a fool, but there is so much power in your blood. So much. They wanted to drink you like a fine, rare wine.”
“Drink me…?”
Mircalla shrugged. “Men have some uses.”
“God! What are you?”
“You wouldn’t even know if I told you. Mircalla, Miracall, Millarca, Carmilla…”
“You’re not making sense.”
She smiled beneath her veil. “Pick a card.”
Without meaning to, without wanting to, he did.
“Turn it over,” she commanded.
Grey glanced toward the east. The ghosts were closer now. Time, he knew, was running out. He had lingered too long, even here in this dream.
He turned the card over.
The picture showed a man hanging by one foot, hands bound behind him, dangling upside down from a gallows. Unlike any gallows Grey had seen, this one was made from living wood and fresh leaves sprouted from it. Despite being so perversely executed, the face of the hanging man was serene and composed, and there was a saintly glow around his head.
Mircalla grunted in surprise. “The martyr’s card,” she mused. “Interesting. I would not have thought it of you.”
“I’m no damn martyr,” he snapped.
“You do not know what you are, man of two worlds.” She laughed and traced the edges of the card. “The man who lives between the worlds. Yes… that’s what it says about you. You do not belong to either life or death.”
There was regret in her voice.
“That means that I and my sisters cannot have you, Greyson Torrance,” she continued. “You are exempt, pardoned. Not from your crimes but from my web. So sad. Such a loss. And I suppose you must have your companion, too. My sisters will be so disappointed.”
“What are you talking about?” Grey said, and he could hear the pleading tone in his own voice. “Tell me what this all means.”
“It means,” she said, “that the universe, for good or ill, is not done with you. I am forbidden to claim you. Your journey is not over. Weary, weary journeys lie before you.”
“Make sense, damn you.”
“Make sense? You ask something very dangerous of a gifted one, my doomed young man. But you ask and the card compels me to answer and so I will.” She bent closer and spoke in such a low voice that he was forced to lean closer in order to hear. “You will walk in the land of the shadow, Grey Torrance. Deep into the heart of darkness. Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye. Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.”
“I don’t understand any of that.”