I was not surprised when Theresa quietly offered them to me, saying, “Why don’t you lock up for the night, Carl? It will be your responsibility from now on.”
“Thank you,” I said, keeping my walls up. As the only male reader left, I was the logical one to get the scut work. I made it sound like an honor. Her Leo ego practically purred.
The taxi took Thom away. Miss Theresa retired upstairs. The day’s tea had been stowed in the cellar long before, so I pretended to lock up, walked down the street and disappeared into the chill October night.
At seven past Midnight, I slipped back, reentered and stood in the middle of the darkened tea room floor. I sensed various presences. It wasn’t that the ghosts only come out at night, but their more subtle energies are not easily detected amid the buzz and bustle of the day. I tuned them out. They did not matter to me. Most were long-dead readers, anyway. I would not end up like them — so stuck to a life and locality that even in death they could not move on into the Light.
Once my eyes were accustomed to the webby gloom, I sought the cellar entry door with its ebony-painted Holy Lord hinges. It was padlocked, but the key ring offered up an old brass skeleton key that fit. The ponderous padlock broke apart with a rattling clatter.
Quietly, I descended. Easing shut the door behind me, I flicked on a pencil flashlight, and moved down the tread-worn steps. The air down here smelt of salt and spray, as if the fishy Atlantic was slowly seeping in through the foundation stones. Or possibly the rafters were still soaked in the brine that had swallowed the wreck of the old Blue Moon.
The tea stood openly in stacked oaken chests, high up on rough pine pallets above the flood line. Old chests, bound in salt-rusted iron straps. Pirates surely buried their booty in such chests. The chests were padlocked, too. I chose one, attempted to insert various keys to it. None fit. From a pocket, I drew a stainless steel pick. My talents are not merely limited to the psychic.
The lock surrendered after a long period of ratlike squeals and squeaks of metal. Carefully, I lifted the heavy iron-bound lid.
The tea lay wrapped in nautical oilskin. I undid the flaps, exposing heap upon heap of blackish Orange Pekoe cut leaves that make me think of rich tropical loam.
The smell was spicy, exotic, instantly intoxicating. Regulating my breathing, I slowed my brainwaves, easing down into an Alpha state, then doused the flash.
It was a hunch that made me kill the light. As I inhaled the aromatic scent, I touched the tea with trembling fingers, psychometrizing the treasure trove of slightly moist leaves. My eyes began to apprehend things in the dark. I saw a Clipper pull into a wild jungle port. Amber-brown Asiatic natives came to the crude dock bearing chest after chest of freshly harvested tea leaves. They made strange signs as they traded the chests for gold and silver. Other, more exotic objects were traded, too. I perceived a faceless ebony idol, and sensed part of its name — hotep. It meant nothing to me.
Then the Blue Moon cast off. I could see her clip off the miles back to America. I saw her tear into the teeth of gales and storms, as indomitable as a gleaming sword. My ears were assaulted by the tortured creaking of her stout timbers, the cracking of her stressed sails. High winds howled about my face.
The dirt floor beneath my feet turned hard and unstable, like a tossing ship’s deck. I felt transported, as if back to that hard era where seamen spent months of their lives husbanding strange cargoes and argosies across vast, unforgiving oceans. Hastily, I slammed down the lid to choke off those intoxicating fumes.
Whatever made Kingsport tea what it was, it could rob a man of all connection to earthly reality. And for that reason, I knew I had to find out where it came from. I had to go to the source. For with a reliable supply of Kingsport tea, I would become the most powerful psychic of modern times. No more thirty-dollar a half-hour readings for me, with two-thirds of the fee going to the house.
Exhaling in long gusts to clear the tang of tea from my lungs, I crept back to the first floor, restored all locks, and stole away— to sleep and dream of a future certain to be mine. A future built upon a mountain of magical tea.
Over the next few months, I got to know Miss Theresa well. I had become her good right hand. In time, she trusted me enough that I received the keys to the cellar tea store.
Cautiously, I brought up the subject of Kingsport tea.
“There is no tea like it on earth,” she confided one evening, warming to the subject. “The leaves are the highest grade. They are not the lesser leaves like Pekoe cut or Pekoe Souchong. There are no fannings in my tea. We get our store from the same plantation that my great-great-great grandfather Esau Terrill founded in ’53. It’s still there, unchanged and undisturbed by the dreary modern world. Every November the tea is harvested and set upon withering racks. And each December, a new store is laid in for the year to come. Tradition is so important here, you know.”
She drifted off into a reverie. In that unguarded moment, I shifted my consciousness over to my left temporal lobe, and listened psychically. Faintly, as if whispered into my brain by a soft-voiced ghost, I got one word: Siam.
And I knew she spoke the truth about where to find the timeless tea. Strange that I heard Siam, and not Thailand. I threw my qualms away. This was a breakthrough.
Miss Theresa shook off her memories. “I should do your chart, Mr. Shaner. I am an accomplished astrologer, as well as a card reader of the old school. I happen to have a Grand Trine in Fire. Did you know that?”
That made her a Sag Moon and Aries Rising, or the reverse, on top of that Leo Sun. Anyone with that much fire in her chart was someone you didn’t cross — or crossed very, very carefully, if you must.
“I would be honored,” I said gallantly.
She smiled toothily. “Give me your exact birth data.”
I hesitated. This was probably the most dangerous moment since I had come to Theresa Terrill’s Tea Room. But there was no time to think. I broke a rule and gave the old lioness my true birth data. Couldn’t chance her intuiting a lie, psychically or astrologically. If I so much as shaved my birth hour to a.m. instead of p.m., that would change the Rising Sign and all of the houses. She’d know when she drew up the chart that I was no Gemini rising, even if I hadn’t already spilled those beans at our first meeting. I only hoped she didn’t detect my intentions via my planetary picture. For there is an old astrological saying: “Scorpio is the thief.”
I jumped back to the subject. “How did trade with Siam start?”
Theresa folded the paper slip on which she had written my birth particulars. “During the reign of King Mongkut, the most honorable and long-lived Siamese ruler in history. Mongkut had been a Buddhist monk for nearly 30 years before he was elevated to the Siamese throne. Siam in those days was the only Asian power to resist colonial rule.” Touching my wrist, she lowered her voice. “It was said he dabbled in forbidden arts and practices. The tea trade made him rich, and world-famous, for Siam was not, and is not today, a tea-producing nation. But the tea that did grow in the inaccessible regions of the Khorat Plateau was potent in ways that transcended all other teas.”
“Never heard of Mongkut…”
“He was also known as Rama IV,” Miss Theresa purred. You would have thought she was related to the old potentate. “The monarch of The King and I was based upon his illustrious life,” she added.
It sounded like hyperbole, but my psychic guts were telling me it was the truth. That impressed me. I sensed that the Terrills owned King Mongkut back in those days. Nothing ever changes. Not politics or power. That’s why I figured on setting up shop in Washington DC when I scored what I wanted. My chart was presented to me on Halloween night. Miss Theresa analyzed it for me in the kitchen, after closing.