"Stomp on it!"
But by the time they had jumped up to smash their feet on the stony spine of the ancient lion, the card was a black ruin.
"Doug! Now we'll never know what it said!"
Douglas held the flaking warm ashes in the palm of his hand. "No, I saw. I remember the words."
The ashes blew about in his fingers, whispering.
"You remember in that Charlie Chase Comedy last spring where the Frenchman was drowning and kept yelling something in French which Charlie Chase couldn't figure. Secours, Secours! And someone told Charlie what it meant and he jumped in and saved the man. Well, on this card, with my own eyes, I saw it. Secours!"
"Why would she write it in French?"
"So Mr. Black wouldn't know, dumb!"
"Doug, it was just an old watermark coming out when you scorched the card...." Tom saw Douglas's face and stopped. "Okay, don't look mad. It was 'sucker' or whatever. But there were other words...."
"Mme. Tarot, it said. Tom, I got it now! Mme. Tarot's real, lived a long time ago, told fortunes. I saw her picture once in the encyclopedia. People came from all over Europe to see her. Well, don't you figure it now yourself? Think, Tom, think!"
Tom sat back down on the lion's back, looking along the street to where the arcade lights flickered.
"That's not the real Mrs. Tarot?"
"Inside that glass box, under all that red and blue silk and all that old half-melted wax, sure! Maybe a long time ago someone got jealous or hated her and poured wax over her and kept her prisoner forever and she's passed down the line from villain to villain and wound up here, centuries later, in Green Town, Illinois--working for Indian-head pennies instead of the crown heads of Europe!"
"Villains? Mr. Black?"
"Name's Black, shirt's black, pants're black, tie's black. Movie villains wear black, don't they?"
"But why didn't she yell last year, the year before?"
"Who knows, every night for a hundred years she's been writing messages in lemon juice on cards, but everybody read her regular message, nobody thought, like us, to run a match over the back to bring out the real message. Lucky I know what secours means."
"Okay, she said, 'Help!' Now what?"
"We save her, of course."
"Steal her out from under Mr. Black's nose, huh? And wind up witches ourselves in glass boxes with wax poured on our faces the next ten thousand years."
"Tom, the library's here. We'll arm ourselves with spells and magic philters to fight Mr. Black."
"There's only one magic philter will fix Mr. Black," said Tom. "Soon's he gets enough pennies any one evening, he--well, let's see." Tom drew some coins from his pocket. "This just might do it. Doug, you go read the books. I'll run back and look at the Keystone Kops fifteen times; I never get tired. By the time you meet me at the arcade, it might be the old philter will be working for us."
"Tom, I hope you know what you're doing."
"Doug, you want to rescue this princess or not?"
Douglas whirled and plunged.
Tom watched the library doors wham shut and settle. Then he leaped over the lion's back and down into the night. On the library steps, the ashes of the tarot card fluttered, blew away.
The arcade was dark; inside, the pinball machines lay dim and enigmatic as dust scribblings in a giant's cave. The peep shows stood with Teddy Roosevelt and the Wright Brothers faintly smirking or just cranking up a wooden propeller. The witch sat in her case, her waxen eyes cauled. Then, suddenly, one eye glittered. A flashlight bobbed outside through the dusty arcade windows. A heavy figure lurched against the locked door, a key scrabbled into the lock. The door slammed open, stayed open. There was a sound of thick breathing.
"It's only me, old girl," said Mr. Black, swaying.
Outside on the street, coming along with his nose in a book, Douglas found Tom hiding in a door nearby.
"Shh!" said Tom. "It worked. The Keystone Kops, fifteen times; and when Mr. Black heard me drop all that money in, his eyes popped, he opened the machine, took out the pennies, threw me out and went across to the speak-easy for the magic philter."