She shook her head, “No.”
No further explanation was given and I watched her dig around in her jacket pocket, coming up with a broken cigarette. She licked the length of it, forcing it to straighten with her spit alone.
“I removed all the blades from his razor and I’ve taken away his belt and shoelaces,” she offered as she brought the flame of her bright pink lighter close to her lips, igniting the cigarette as she dragged in upon it.
I took the two small steps it took to get right next to her and sat down. She eyed me in surprise, but didn’t say anything.
“Do we know what he did?” My voice sounds soft, even to my ears, and I swallow down the need to repeat myself. Zoey would answer in her own time.
“I don’t know,” she glanced at me with stark honesty in her eyes, “Marie thinks it was a Shadowman, I think it was a Demon.”
“What does Max think?”
Zoey grunts, “Max doesn’t want to come near him in case she makes it worse - she’s convinced she makes everything shit, and it doesn’t help that her Club name is the Tower, for God's Sake.”
I flattened my lips into a thin line. My stomach dropped when I realised what I was actually doing, and quickly reverted back to a straight grimace, because that flat lipped expression was too close to what my mother would do in a situation like this, and the last thing I wanted was to be a replica of Emily Rand.
I stood abruptly, the energy coursing through me, my instinct telling me to move - to get inside and see him. I tapped Zoey on the shoulder, “I’m going in.”
Before she could offer her warnings, or try and dissuade me, I was through the door, standing in the dark cabin as I waited for my eyes to adjust. The air smelt stale. It took a moment for me to make out the shape of Charl hunched on the floor of the cabin, rocking back and forth, his head buried in his knees, legs pulled up towards his chest.
Shit.
“All right,” I clapped loudly, putting on my best authoritative voice I could muster.
I flicked on the lightswitch, fluorescent light flooded the cabin as I took in the scene before me. Despite being in the darkness for several hours, Charl didn’t flinch away from the light’s brightness, and when his gaze finally found mine, there wasn’t a flicker of recognition within them. He sat in a pair of jeans, barefoot and shirtless. Bright red marks covered his body,as if he had been digging into his skin with his bare hands.
In two long strides, I was before him, and I was terrified. I wasn’t terrified of him, I was terrified for him.
I squatted in front of him, “Come on, Charl, you’re better than this.”
My voice was harsh and brittle, but he didn’t react, not immediately. I gripped his chin, positioning his face towards me.
“Is anyone better than anything?” His voice sounded hollow, and something within urged me to lean forward and blow across his face. I did. I whispered words of protection and banishment. Words of healing. Even words of prayer as I imagined tugging on the thread that bound Charl into this world - this present.
My thighs shook from holding my position for so long, but I was terrified to move, lest I break the progress that I was making. Even if I couldn’t see it, I knew that there was progress - I could feel it.
I repeated the process over and over again, until finally Charl blinked, coming back to himself. I sighed, collapsing into my relief.
Despite the dark moments, those summers were the best of my life. I learnt to read Tarot as if it were my sixth sense. My intuition was something I was able to rely on without fail. And the Magick? It was enthralling. We spent our days learning new spellwork, combining our skills, summoning Demons, pledging ourselves to deities, and casting circles.
I operated in the shaded grey bit of Magick, where I was neither a straight White Magick nor Dark Magick user - I thrived in the little space where the two overlapped. I drew from different sources and often dabbled in the darker side of things. I enjoyed dipping in and out of different practices, adapting them for my own use, but it also meant that I didn’t fully belong to one sect entirely, which often left me even more excluded. As time grew, we each found our own path with little to no judgement against one another, our beliefs stemming from the very connection with Magick that each of us made. That connection was everything - it defined my soul.
For me, Magick was pure energy and I was simply the tool used to manipulate it in order to gain a specific outcome. That meant that light and dark - the savory and unsavory - simply didn't come into play for me. Because energy at its core base is neutral. Meaning that it all comes down to our perception. Of course, not everyone in the Tarot Club agreed with this notion, so we simply took an ‘agree to disagree’ approach.
The Club was filled with those who were easily defined as a Green Witch, or a Hearth Witch, and some had an affinity towards crystals, or herbs, or candles, or sigils. But then there were a couple of others who were just like me, choosing to flit between different Sources of Magick, drawing on them as we saw fit. Each of us seemed to gravitate or have an affinity towards one base element - mine was water, and looking back, I supposed it had always been water. I had always felt more at peace in the pool or in the rain, it didn’t matter.
Our little band of misfits grew in strength. We all got better - more skilled - and what's more, our skills varied. Certain types of Magick stood as closed practices. That meant you could only practice them if you were invited by someone of that specific Magickal lineage. Charl made sure that the Tarot Club boasted an array of different lineages, opening up our education and Magickal uses even further. I couldn't boast such a heritage. I couldn't beat on my chest and yell to the world that my ancestors were Witches, but that didn't mean that Magick did not thrum through my very veins. It was an education of a different kind, and for that I was grateful.
My summer’s were not spent traipsing after boys, instead I consumed myself with the knowledge around which deities spoke to me; which herbs and spices were easily combined with Candle Magick; and Tarot - always Tarot.
Soon enough, Charl started shopping our skills out, and so the Tarot Club became a sort of exclusive Magick guild. We began reading cards for mostly housewives. And while housewives still stand as a fair portion of our clientele, somewhere along the line Charl had upped the ante, contracting us out to NGOs and Multinational firms. None of them wanted to admit to having a Witch on standby, but we were the reason their amalgamations and mergers went as smoothly as they did. Charl had a knack for matching one of the Tarot Club members to each client for specific spells and readings. As a standard, I hated doing love spells for clients. Did I do them? Yeah, sometimes. But the outcome was rarely what you expected it to be.
Unsurprisingly, Charl rarely did any of the work, not that he couldn't - he is called the Magician for a reason, but I think maybe it was just easier for him to find the clients and book us, taking his cut that way. He also seemed to have an uncanny knack of finding high paying clients who gave us continuous work. He kept talking about possibly investing in an actual office space so we could have some sort of headquarters, but in truth, the only person who would be there would probably be Charl. So for now, twice a year, the whole Club got together at one of our seedy bars we liked to frequent. We had left Summer Camp long behind us, but the need to meet regularly did not disappear simply because Summer Camp did.
We made an interesting picture. An eclectic bunch that seemingly had nothing in common, the thread connecting us, invisible to the human eye.
Charl always ended up hooking up with someone shady from the bar, who usually couldn’t figure out which one of us he belonged to. One girl actually accused us of being his harem. And in some ways we were - a Magickal harem.
Who knows, if Charl was intent on contracting us to the mob, then perhaps headquarters were a necessity - a clear space that was marked as Tarot Club territory. I shrugged the thought off, leaving Charl to deal with those details - that was his job after all.
Pulling myself back into the present, allowing the memory of those summers to wash over me, I bundled my way further down the street. I hadn't even asked Charl about Cort. Shit. I'd have to call him sometime to chat about the Demon.