[stylist] Short Fiction - "The Golgotha Tarpt" - Severaleth Draft

[William L Houts]

HI Brigit,

Looks like I really need to dive into this one and do some major work.  
I hadn't expected that and thought that, at worst, there might be some 
passing touch up work to do.  I'll definitely give the story three 
ganders and a hip replacement.  I wrote it a few years ago and should 
probably have given it a more critical reread than I did before [posting 
it.  Thank you for your critical eye and keen attention.


--Bill



On 7/27/2015 3:44 PM, Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter via stylist wrote:
> Bill,
>
> Taking time to read through your short story.
>
> This is probably not your fault at all, likely it's the transfer, but the paragraphs are all screwy. When I read para-to-para or even just down arrow, it's separating the paras half through.
>
> Had is not necessary in following, "Master Klinghoffer had snorted."
> It's using passive voice. Had is a past perfect verb. It implies the past past, so to speak, and not necessary since the tense is already past. Basically, it changes the subject of the sentence.
> Also, the above line should be attached to following dialogue as it's an action attributed to the speaker.
>
> Watch dialogue tags in general, especially when containing adverbs. Instead, attach an action conveying a harsh tone or meek demeanor or whatever it is you are going for. And limit the I said and he asked and all those dialogue tags.
>
> What exactly is the "ordeal" in the following, "My bowels froze. I had long since learn that in Master Klinghoffer’s house,the ordeal was never over."
> Not entirely sure what ordeal he's referring to.
>
> The following implies your main character has been whipped, but we never witness this. I would find a way to give this exposition. Can and should be brief, but it's thrown at us out of nowhere, "I sagged against the back of my chair,then cried out and sat straiht up again, the stripes on my back thrumming with pain."
>
> When describing with list, need comma, "I looked up from my hands and saw that a diabolical smile was playing on Master’s droll (comma) little mouth."
>
> Watch for clichés, "My hand instantly recoiled as if bitten by a snake, while my eyes returned to the lacquered case."
>
> The two following paras should be together, forming a single para, "His sharp voice bit again."
>
> And,,
>
> "'It is not ‘a Tarot deck’,” he snorted.“It is the Golgotha Tarot! Do you think I’d keep some rummy old Waite deck in the Box?'"
>
> Also, the above dialogue doesn't make much sense. The Masters response seems out of place considering the question asked. It does not even address the question asked.
>
> When we find out that this is happening in our world, it's a bit disconcerting. When the Master reflects how he lived in Washington, I find it a bit jarring. Up to this point, the story seems to take place in a different universe, so it seems out of place when an actual location is given. I think, if you want to keep it this way, we need to know up front that we are in our world.
>
> Really like the description of the house, comparing it to an old man, "'The next morning, I took a cab to the site of the estate sale. It was a Tudor mansion in Surrey, grand and corrupt, like an athletic young man gone depraved in old age. At the door, I was greeted cheerfully enough, but with a sort of wry contempt, and I learned thatI was not to have called unannounced, but to have made arrangements through an agent.'"
>
> You need some kind of transition, Segway, between sections. Even just white space, but it's confusing when we jump to the main character meeting at the house of his dead master.
>
> Okay, very confusing. Apparently the story about the purchase of the tarot cards is the Masters story? Why the switch in POV? It's confusing.
>
> What does, "The tomes of civilized derision," mean?
>
> Should, "King of Staves," be Knaves?
>
> There's redundancy with the narration about the cards and the following dialogue stating the same information. Choose one way to explain about the cards-- personally, I would go with the dialogue.
>
> "One of us was not alive to the significance of the meeting," is a clunky description that doesn't make much sense. Maybe find a cleaner way to describe this encounter.
>
> The dialogue the Master speaks about paying for the meal is way to long. If it all needs to be there, it needs to be broken up with action.
>
> Is there a significance to the Master reading the cards on Easter? I know Eoster has pagan origins, but not sure how it fits in here or why.
>
> The section about Yom Kippur is also too long dialogue. Dialogue should not be consecutively this long.
>
> The narrative thread is a bit all over the place. Tighten up the story for better control.
>
> The plot is also a little fuzzy. What exactly is the arc of the story? How do any characters change? What is the point? I'm not entirely sure of these answers as a reader.
>
> Make sure paras fit together. Action attributed to the speaker of dialogue should be a single para. And cut the long sections of dialogue. Either create shorter dialogue, or separate with action.
>
> I miss the language and metaphor so abundant in your poetry in this story. I see your intellect in it, but not your typical writing style or voice. Maybe you can incorporate your personal style in your prose as well.
>
> Bridgit
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: stylist [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of William L Houts via stylist
> Sent: Friday, July 24, 2015 7:45 PM
> To: Writer's Division Mailing List <stylist at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: William L Houts <lukaeon at gmail.com>
> Subject: [stylist] Short Fiction - "The Golgotha Tarpt" - Severaleth Draft
>
>
>
> Happy Weekend, Friends:
>
> Here's a short story I wrote several years ago.  I thought it was pretty good when I wrote it back then, whenever "when" was, but upon reading it recently, I found that improvements could be made.  I just don't have the sails to camp out here and do the editing, to mix metaphors. But I thought I'd post it, as I've never posted prose here, and despite the evils of this thing, I think that it has its charm, if it's not simply damnable of me to say so. Comments welcome, as always.
>
> --Bill
>
>
> ---
>
>
>      The Golgotha Tarot
>
> By
>
> William L. Houts
>
>
>    Noel Klinghoffer, who used to be my master, said that the problem with
>    most contemporary black magicians is that they aren’t contemporary at
>    all, let alone magical. Most of them are shabby , furious little men
>    who like to dress up in robes, chant Latin badly and wave swords
>    around. They’re antiquarian hacks with a grudge.There’s always an
>    ex-wife they want to terrorize, a demanding boss to torment or a drunk
>    who bullied them at their favorite bar in front of friends.
>
> But the Mirror --as my master called Hell--doesn’t care about Latin unless it’s pronounced with a certain panache. In the 21stcentury, he says, English is the language of power anyway. And as for robes, all but the most sentimental of demon lords prefer to treat with a magusdressed in a three piece Saville Row suit, an Italian shirt, a fine tie, and at least one good gold ring or bracelet.In sum, he says, the magus should spend no less than five thousand dollars on ceremonial attire.
>
> “Can’t you work with more minor demons and spend less money on clothes?”
> I asked.
>
> Master Klinghoffer had snorted.
>
> “You may do so,” he replied, “If you wish to waste your time.”
>
> “You really can’t do any work with the minor ones?” I pressed.
>
> Master heaved a great sigh and scratched the stubble on his massive ruddy face.
>
> “If youwant to scare children at Halloween,” he said, “or cause Aunt Betsy’s Ouija board to make rude remarks they are exactly right for the job.”
>
> He went on to explain that the minor ones --“shite fiends” he called
> them-- made lots of stink and noise, but to get anything done worth doing, you had to deal with the princes.
>
> “Even for scaring mean bosses and ex-wives?” I asked.
>
> “Like everything, Turd,” he said, “it depends.If we want Mr. Cogswell to have nightmares, we send a dog to smash his lamps and overturn his bookcase. If we want Sheila to lose her hair, we might pray to the Sister of Worms. But if we want Sheila and Mr. Cogswell to suffer horribly and die, we go to the great lords of the mirror.”
>
> Master Klinghoffer placed his fleshy hands on his immense girth and burbled laughter.
>
> I watched his face, fascinated.
>
> Master Klinghoffer is not what you’d expect of a black magician.In all the old stories, the magus is a gaunt fellow, grim and spare, all excess flesh burnt up by passion for his art as if ina kind of terrible fever.
> There’s a sense of physical cost, of the body being spent for gifts of knowledge and power.
>
> But Master Klinghoffer is the fattest person I have ever known or heard of. His fingers are like sausages, his neck like a great pink ham and his belly the side of some immense beef.He looks, in fact, as if he had been painted by Archimbaldo, if that mad artist had used hams and steaks to depict his subjects rather than fruits and vegetables.
>
> Ironically for a black magician, he also resembles G.K. Chesterton. And he had something of the same fierce good humor. His thick red lips now trembled with mirth at the thought of the hypothetical Cogswell and the very real Sheila Klinghoffer receiving their infernal just desserts.
>
> But although my master shared divorce woes with his magical confreres, he was obviously not little and he was distinctly unshabby.Master Klinghoffer covered his immense bulk with the finest silks in subtle hues cunningly matched. He smoked Cuban cigars, wore gold rings on four fingers of his left hand and a scarab earring with ruby eyes in his left ear. On nights when he was not inviting infernal Princes into his Chambre des Arts, as he called it, he drank a rare single malt whiskey, then slept in an antique canopied English fourposter. The thread count of his sheets bordered on the improbable.
>
> But Master Klinghoffer’s greatest prize was “the Box”. The plainness of the term was one of his peculiar jokes.The box was a locked silver chest the size of a large family bible.The lid was decorated with an etched phallus surmounted by a sun.An etchedserpent coiledabout the chest, swallowing its tail just below the gold plated keyhole.
>
> In the second year of my apprenticeship to Master Klinghoffer, immediately after having gone through, mostly unsuccessfully, the Fifth ordeal of Abjection, I was entrusted with his second greatest secret.Emerging from his bedroom, into which I was meant never to go, my master sat me down in the living room to peruse the Box’s strange evocative contents.
>
> “This,” he said as I snuffled, carefully placing the box on the black dining room table,“is the wicked trove.”
>
> He sat across from me,watchingme closely as I stared at the Box.Five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty.
>
> “Are you going to open it?” I finally ventured.
>
> I sweated.Maybe the ordeal wasn’t really over and this was the final test. I was exhausted and bleeding, tears still fresh on my faceand I didn’t want to fail again this evening.
>
> “Do you think yourself so worthy?” he asked harshly.
>
> I have mentioned the roundness and good humor of Master Klinghoffer.But it would be incorrectto think him some conventional jolly fat man. His eyes, like chips of green ice, now glared at me from across the table.
> My bowels froze. I had long since learn that in Master Klinghoffer’s house,the ordeal was never over.
>
> “No, Magister,” I replied instantly.“I am a worm.”
>
> Though he was sarcastic about bad Latinists, I’d found it best to use the Latin word for master when he was in one of his furies.
>
> “You are not!” Master Klinghoffer snapped.“You are a turd!”
>
> “Yes, magister!” I agreed.
>
> “And you have no business profaning the holy contents of this box with your sewer eyes.”
>
> “No Magister,” I said.
>
> “You are filthy and stupid,” he said airily.
>
> “Yes Magister,” I agreed.
>
> He pursed his red little lips.
>
> “Mere automatic assent won’t cut it, Turd,” he said severely. “You must suffer the truth when you speak it.”
>
> “Yes, Magister,” I croaked, beginning to weep again.
>
> I sagged against the back of my chair,then cried out and sat straiht up again, the stripes on my back thrumming with pain.
>
> “And you must also suffer when you lie,” he said, pointedly ignoring my outburst.The cold fury of his eyes relentedby a pinprick.
>
> I nodded miserably and stared at my hands, which were folded on the table.
>
> “Besides,” he said, “Sheila would swallow her tongue if she learned that you got to see the contents of the Box and she didn’t.”
>
> I looked up from my hands and saw that a diabolical smile was playing on Master’s droll little mouth.
>
> “You mean…?” I began, grateful, unbelieving.
>
> “You took your scourging with a certain flair,” he said. “And anyway, what’s the point of having a secret treasure if no one knows about it?”
>
> I laughed then, dripping tears of gratitude onto the gleaming black table.Andtaking a ring of many keys from hispants pocket, he sorted out one, a silver baroque looking thing, and thrust it into the Box’s golden keyhole.When he turned it, there was a faint pleasing tunkle, and Master lifted the lid to reveal his wicked trove.
>
> The silver Box contained five items arranged on a cloth of purple satin.
> There was a case of some lacquered black wood,inscribed with a pentacle in white enamel, a small leather pouch, a large gold coin franked with the words BASILEIOS ALEXANDROS, a crystal wand about seven inches long and a second, more slender golden wand about nine inches long. Thiswas topped with a round lens of blue glass set into a golden frame, about the size of a half dollar.
>
> I smiled.I had passed through terrorand could now enjoy wonder.Such were the pillars which upheld the house of Master Klinghoffer.
>
> The nature of the coin was obvious enough.But all else in the Box was mysterious to me.
>
> “What’s this?” I asked, pointing to the black lacquered case.
>
> “That’s the Golgotha Tarot,” he said, “ also known as the Judas Deck.It was purchased at the estate sale of an esteemed antiquarian and occultist. It is the linchpin of my success.”
>
> Master Klinghoffer didn’t often use the word “power”, thinking it a vulgarism employed by his sword-waving inferiors.
>
> “And this?” I asked, pointing to the pouch.
>
> That is a molar extracted from Napoleon on the island of St. Helena.”
>
> Master Klinghoffer sucked his own tooth as if cleansing it of grit. He didn’t like to say the word “saint”.
>
> I passed over the crystal wand and pointed to the golden one.
>
> “What in the world is this thing?” I asked.
>
> “After the Golgotha,” he said, “that is the greatest treasureof the wicked trove.It is called the oculis or Eye of Chartres in the grimoires.”
>
> Suddenly deranged with curiosity, I reached out to touch the oculisand was harshly rebuffed.
>
> “Don’t touch it!” snapped Master Klinghoffer, and his eyes again glinted dangerously. .
>
> My hand instantly recoiled as if bitten by a snake, while my eyes returned to the lacquered case.
>
> “How is the, I mean if it is not impertinent to ask, how is the Tarot deck the linchpin--“
>
> His sharp voice bit again.
>
> “It is not ‘a Tarot deck’,” he snorted.“It is the Golgotha Tarot! Do you think I’d keep some rummy old Waite deck in the Box?”
>
> This time, there was a drop of humor in the acid.
>
> “No magister,” I said, relaxing a little then straightening abruptly so as not to aggravate my wounds again.
>
> I watched as Master Klinghoffer heaved himself afoot androlled himself to the liquor cabinet.He poured a glass of his whiskey and returned to his seat. He wet his bow mouth then set his glass down and began to talk.There were reasons a magus took an apprentice on. Holding candles and reading the responses in black liturgies was only one part of them.
> Reflecting back to the magus his arcane glory was another part. I think that there is also a third part, but I won’t say what it is.
>
> I set my face on grateful awe and gaped at the Master.
>
> “Sheila and I were living in Tacoma, Washington,” he said, savoring the whiskey.“It was a little house on Alaska, the sort of neighborhood you see lots of in that city.Dogs in the yard, trikes in the driveway and roofing shingles in the yard.”
>
> He pressed his lips together briefly, looked to one side and went on.
>
> “Little Noel was four then.I worked as an intake clerk in the bankruptcy court while Sheila looked after the boy. We lived on Top Ramen and Velveeta.”
>
> He took another drink, savored and thought.I watched him steadily, like a doll.
>
> “Sheila married me for magic!” he chuckled. “She wanted to know if magic could buy us a better address, and I told her that it could. All of her goody goody friends at the Unity Church were into pyramid powerand positive thinking.And I told her that I knew a deeper magic.Older.
> Deeper. Darker.”
>
> He drained his glass, rose to refill it, then sat down again, staring into his glass.
>
> “She loved the sound of that: darker magic.Whatever she says now, she was glad to have bagged a real black magician. Her friends’ husbands were plumbers and carpet cleaners. Our Ford didn’t run half the time, but we still had a bit of glamour, while they only had game shows.”
>
> He burbled again, a low throaty sound, and drank.
>
> “And it began to make us some money, Turd,” he said. “Even then.
>
> Master Klinghoffer’s face was ruddy, his forehead beaded with sweat.
>
> “And it didn’t hurt that I’m a Jew,” he said. “Sheila’s friends and their beaus were all poor WASPS, while I was just a little bit exotic.
> Sheila told her friends the tale that my father was a mystical rabbi who taught me certain forbidden Jewish mysteries.Soon they were paying her for ancient Kabbalistic curses from her sorcerous Jew husband.”
>
> Laughing his throaty laugh, Master Klinghoffer drank again.
>
> “But I wasn’t content with fifty dollars a week for putting the mojo on unfaithful husbands and careless hairdressers.I wasn’t a magus yet, Turd, but I was a true student of the Backward Art. And I meant to plunder the treasuries of an unsuspecting world.”
>
> “But the curses,” I asked seriously, “weren’t they real?”
>
> “It depends on what you mean by real,” he said serenely.“I used names from the /Key of Solomon/, but the curses were scribbled on a spiral notebook over beer and macaroni.”
>
> This was all wrong.I had long ached to know some of Master Klinghoffer’s secrets, but I didn’t want to hear about macaroni and spiral notebooks.
> I wanted the dark rabbinical father.I wanted rare grimoires found in dusty bookshops.
>
> “So you just, what, rooked them then?” I said.“These plumber’s wives?”
>
> I said it with a vehemence born of my recent flogging, a vehemence I didn’t even know I held. And without whiskey in him, Master Klinghoffer might well have whipped me bloody again, or worse. In the past , I had been forced to eat spiders for mild impertinence, beaten for appearing to think unflattering thoughts. Surely, I would now be disciplined for more than suggesting that Master Klinghoffer was a mountebank.
>
> “Oh Turd!” he said, and the fondness in his voice was somehow more galling than a backhanded slap. “You’re not still addicted to little myths about authority, are you?”
>
> “What do you mean?” I said, trying not to sound peevish. Even tipsy, Master Klinghoffer could only be pushed so far.
>
> “You know well enough!” he snapped.“You think authority only comes from old books and white beards. But true power can surge through a spell scribbled on notebook paper to feed a wife and child.”
>
> I knew he was powerful.I knew he was knowledgeable.But I didn’t always credit Master Klinghoffer with being subtle.
>
> “Yes, Magister,” I said humbly.
>
> “Besides,” he said gravely, “you’ve been in the Chambre des Arts.You’ve heard their voices.You’ve seen them, or parts of them, in the smoke. You think sorcery and charlatanry are opposites.But when you are poor, you learn that cunningis a magical discipline.And the art I’m teaching you, Turd,is true.”
>
> “Yes Magister,” I said.It was worse than a flogging. I felt ashamed and very small.
>
> But my master was not in a punishing mood now.He continued his tale cheerfully.
>
> “So, I made some extra scratch selling hexes. But I had faith that I was meant for more interesting things.And one day, while reading a certain occult periodical, I--“
>
> “There are magazines for magicians?” I interrupted. This was more along the lines of what I wanted to hear.
>
> Master Klinghoffer glared at me for interrupting, then made his peculiar throaty chuckle.
>
> “Yes, Turd,” he said.“There are one or two secret magazines for magicians. They have low circulations, unpaid staffs and reputations built by word of mouth.The one I subscribed to was called /Trismegistus/.It came out three times a year, of course.Very clever.”
>
> I didn’t get the joke, but I nodded and pretended otherwise.
>
> “Anyway,” he continued, “In one issuethere was an ad in the back for an estate sale and a list of the items to be sold. There were alchemical tinctures, an Elizabethan shewstone, a /Little Albert/, a /Black Pullet/ and other quaint and curious volumes. But among them all was anoccult nonesuch, something only ever read and rumored about.It was an original Golgotha//Tarot in good condition.”
>
> Silently, I marvelled that Master Klinghoffer could clench around the word “saint”, but pronounce “Golgotha” without blinking.
>
> “What’s so special about the Golgotha Tarot?” I ventured. “Does it really go back as far as the Cru--?“
>
> Master Klinghoffer cut me off.
>
> “No!” he rasped.“It is because The Golgotha’s /Hanged Man/ is said by metaphysical idiots to depict the Carpenter.But anyone can tell that it is actually Wotan on the World Tree!”
>
> He was now quite angry and red as a beet.I was exacting a wee price for my stripes. A perilous game, maybe, but I found it a necessary one.With my tiny victory in hand, I went to safer ground.
>
> “But Magister,” I said.“I still don’t understand why the Golgotha is so special. There are lots of old decks around, aren’t there?”
>
> “Nothing compares with the Golgotha,” he answered gravely, appeased.“The way the cards are read today, one only hears vague currents and possibilities.It’s prophecy for ninnies and cowards. But the Golgotha is used to give, in the hands of a magus, events, times and dates as well as subtler etheric conditions. It’s meant to tell kings which roads will take them beyond the assassin’s reach. And assassins where in the Royal Gardens to hide.”
>
> He burbled then, like dark water under a rock.
>
> “It’s poppycock,” he snorted, “but there are old occult whisperingsthat a Golgotha /Tower/ was found in Boothe’s boarding room after he shot Lincoln.”
>
> “Hey!” I blurted. “I read that Os--“
>
> “Of course,” he said with cloying condescension.“They use a different name and date nowadays, but the American version of the rumor started with the Lincoln assassination.”
>
> He drained his glass, rose, refilledit andsat down again.
>
> “Whether true or not,” he said, smacking his lips, “the story indicates the specific power of the deck.The Golgotha is a Tarot of endings.And if you want to begin a new life, a life of gold rings and fine whiskey, you must end the life of beer and macaroni.”
>
> Master Klinghoffer drank and turned his great boulderlike head aside for a long while. His lips were pursed, his ruddy features unreadable. The ruby eyes of his scarab earring seemed to glare at me. .
>
> My stomach was turning.When he did this, there was often some severity, some harsh perversity to follow, besides which the eating of spiders would be a delightful escapade.
>
> But after ten or fifteenminutes, he turned back to face me, his little bow mouth approximating a grin.
>
> “Upon our marriage,” he said,“Sheila’s father had given me a dowry of five thousand dollars, to be used for the down payment on a house.I decided to secure the Golgotha with it.Lots of things happened then which might interest you, but I can’t be bothered to relate them. It’s all standard occult boilerplate, really.Dreams and eerie coincidences, encounters with grim figures and fell prophecies by same.
>
> “What I will tell you is that Sheila was vehement in her skepticism at first. But afterrancorous argument and the persuasion of certain backward charms, she came to crave the Golgotha even more than I did.She went on and on about how the father of her son would be a mighty wizard, like Merlin. She began to wear black dresses in the house and styleherself the Witch Queen of Alaska Street.My arts had deranged her and I couldn’t board the flight to London fast enough to suit me.
>
> “I remember now that Noel Jr. was inconsolable. He screamed and threw his wooden blocks at me as I hauled my luggage out to the Ford. Before I drove away, I gave him a good swatting.One mustn’t throw one’s wooden blocks at one’s betters, Turd, ever!”
>
> The magus, great and mildly sodden, waggled a reproving finger at me and I stared at the table, nodding, annoyed.Of course I would always refrain from throwing toys at Master Klinghoffer.
>
> “The fourteen hour flight,” he continued, again looking to the side, “was full of wailing children. They screamed and screamed. And no toy or stewardess or pleading mother could silence them.The din was still rattling my skull as we touched down at heathrow. And I dreamed of screaming children when I bedded down at the London Hyatt.I also dreamed, as I recall, of spiders.
>
> The next morning, I took a cab to the site of the estate sale. It was a Tudor mansion in Surrey, grand and corrupt, like an athletic young man gone depraved in old age. At the door, I was greeted cheerfully enough, but with a sort of wry contempt, and I learned thatI was not to have called unannounced, but to have made arrangements through an agent.
>
> “What of the notice in /Trismegistus/?” I asked Ms.Pryce, my greeter and the attorney for the deceased magus.
>
> “That was an error!” she said with some asperity. “But you are the seventh, and that is very much better than six.”
>
> She peered at me closely with unsettling black eyes, like a crow’s.
>
> “Do come in and mind the dogs,”she said at last. I never did meet these threatened canines.
>
> Ms. Pryce led me into a dim parlor which had the quality of being plush withoutalso being comfortable.She gave me a “catalog”--a single sheet of thick creamy paper with listings and suggested starting bids, and briefly left the room.
>
> Six other men sat radiating spectra of hostility at each other, which I, an affable American, didn’t understand for some time.Young as I was, I wasthrilled to meet them, my confreres, these dark uncanny men. But they were not nearly so pleased to meet me.
>
> Mr. Prospero wore Italian shoes, a golden watchfob and an antiquePrisian suit, whileMr. Anubis wore a thick dark turtleneck sweater and dark wool pants tuckedinto boots so black they might have been cut from the leather of patricide. And Mr. Flamel wore a great high-collared frock coat like something from a Victorian novel. The other three were antiquarian types rather than occultists, and were dressed in various English tweeds.But all of them looked at me in my jacket and khakis from Penny’s and greeted me in soft courteous voices.Only a little later did I understand that these were the tones of civilized derision.
>
> One by one, we were each lead from the room to inspect the catalog items and make an offer, while the rest of us were fed the inevitable tea and biscuits. I still do not know how English estate sales are normally conducted, but this was perhaps more like a silent auction than what was announced in the magazine.
>
> Finally, after watching the other six go to make their bids, I was lead up the red-carpeted stairs to the library, which was on the third floor.This was a much happier room than the dreadful little parlor where magicians and booksellers murdered each other psychically. There was a brick fireplace witha merrily crackling blaze.There were two great leather chairs, a liquor cabinet and shelves and shelves of undoubtedly rare volumes.And among them all was a long table, draped in white linen, on which rested the objects of interest.
>
> Although it was there, wrapped in silk withina clear glass tube,I didn’t yet care about the /Eye of Chartres/. I only had eyes for the Golgotha Tarot.But among several other decks in cases, I didn’t recognize it.
>
> “Where is the Golgotha?’ I asked.
>
> Without any sense of knowing its place in occult history, Ms. Pryce plucked the black lacquered case off the table and handed it to me.
>
> “May I open it?” I asked timidly.
>
> She glared at me for a full minute, and though I was then two times her size rather than four, I quailed.
>
> “You would be a fool to bid onit without doing so!” she said severely.
>
> “I slid the box from its cover and gently tipped the cards into my hand.”
>
> Master Klinghoffer now stared thoughtfully at the lacquered case, though he did not, as I had been hoping all evening, open it and show me the deck.
>
> There is,” he said at last, “a sense of delirium about the Golgotha Tarot, particularly in the Major Trumps. Though they were designed by a 15th century English sorceror, some of the cards look more as if they had been painted by Salvador Dali.
>
> “In /The Sun/, for instance, the naked child is hideously equipped and the sun is red and bloated, with rays like squirming tentacles. In /Judgement/, the risen dead do not merely stand, but tumble out of their graves as if the angel’s trumpet blast had destroyed gravity. And in /The House of God/, the shattered /Tower/ is in the background while we gaze into the howling mouth and terrified eyes of the falling /Pope/.
>
> “Beyond the strangeness of the images, the deck was in astonishingly good condition, if a bit brittle, faded and seeming to miss the /Nine of Grails/.Even lacking that one card, I wanted the Golgotha Tarot more than anything I had ever desired. It was not just a divinatory tool, I knew,but power itself. As if liquid occult force had been frozen into seventy-seven images.
>
> My instincts--to withdraw the dowry, fly to London and even to read the /Trismegistus/ ad in the first place, had been correct, had been inspired.
>
> “But if I wanted the Golgotha, surely people who called themselves ‘Anubis’ and ‘Prospero’ would want it even more. With ragged breath, I bid the whole dowry of five thousand dollars on the uncanny deck.
>
> “Then it is yours,” Ms. Pryce said simply.“None of the others would have it.Will you be paying with a bank check or credit card?”
>
> I blinked at her, uncomprehending.
>
> “There are only five known to survive from the 15th century,” I protested,“all of them in private collections.This is a nonesuch, a priceless treasure!”
>
> “I am not such an expert in these things as you gentlemen,” said Ms.
> Pryce, “but the others seemedto have an concern with the /Nine of Grails/.”
>
> “Their loss!” I snorted, and laid out five one thousand dollar bills.
>
> “Quite so,” Ms. Pryce said, looking at me as if I had just placed live beetles on the table.“May I call your cab?”
>
> I did not immediately return to my London hotel room.Instead, I had the driver take me to a Surrey pub called ‘Herne’s Lair’ for dinner.Say what you like about English cooking, their meat pies are divine.
>
> I was there for a half hour, eating my savory pie, drinkin stout and listening to the locals.I had just placed the Golgotha case on the table when in walked Professor Temple, one of the six. Like them, he had been distant during the event.But to my surprise, he now approached and asked if he might join me. Just an hour before, he had not been so chummy, and I was still feeling bruised by it. But no one likes to dine alone.And I saw that he was carrying the glass tube which containedthe /Eye of Chartres/.”
>
> “I say!” he said cheerfully. “You’ve won the Golgotha!And what are you drinking?”
>
> “Stout,” I said coldly.“Sit down if you want. And it wasn’t a matter of winning the Golgotha.Nobody else wanted it.”
>
> I reflected that I could have laid out one thousand dollars rather than five and still carried off the prize.I ground my teeth.
>
> “Twaddle!” he said frankly. “There was much to interest the scholar of magic at poor Mr. Dashwood’s sale. Hard to choose.After all, we’re not the richest lot, are we?”
>
> I reflected on the golden watchfob of Mr.Prospero and grunted my dissent.
>
> “Did you bid on the Golgotha?” I asked, tapping the lacquered case.
>
> “Not my province, really,” he said, looking away.“I’m mainly concerned with French magical instruments of the late medieval period.I took the oculis, you know.Would you like to see it?”
>
> “Although they aren’t perpetually adolescent the way American men are, there is often something of the 12 year old boy in Englishmen.When Professor Temple asked if I would like to see the /Eye of Chartres/, it was more like an offer to show me his pet frog than it was like the sober query of a scholar.I was disarmed.
>
> “Yes,” I said, “I’d be fascinated.”
>
> He gently laid the glass tube on the table and I saw that it was the work of a glassblower rather than a factory, with bubbles and unevenness in thickness. He pulled off the glass stopper and carefully fished out the linen-wrapped oculis. He unwrapped it and we both stared at the device which had been prepared in France more than six centuries before.
>
> “I’m informed,” he said, “that the gold is a bit sour now, but the lens is as rich as stained glass.In fact, It’s cut from the same stuffas the famous cathedral windows.”
>
> “What was it made for?” I asked. It was such a strange and beautiful thing, as you can see.
>
> “It’sany scholar’s dream, of course, to be questioned about their area of expertise. And scholars of late medieval French magical apparati havefewer chances to display their knowledge than most.
>
> So a beaming Professor Temple clasped his hands and held forth on the magical properties ascribed by occult tradition tothe /Eye of Chartres/.
> There was a lot to digest, as the professor had studied alone for years and had many strange facts to disgorge.But the main thrust was that the user of the oculis is reputed to see through appearances to true essences.
>
> “All the while he lectured, we each knocked down several glasses of English stout. And by the time he was finished, we were both royally drunk.
>
> “So now you know my story,” he concluded.“Why don’t you tell my fortune with those bloody cards?”
>
> “A little while ago, Turd, I chastised you for treating the Golgotha as you would any old fortune telling deck. But I was younger then and full of grog, and eager to best this scholar of magic with my own kind of expertise. So I took the Golgotha from its case and carefully laid out eleven cards in the Baphomet spread. The significator, the card representing the Professor was the /King of Staves/, residing at Baphomet’s brow.But the rest were unhappy cards in their direst positions. And the last card, the one in the center, was /Death/.
>
> “Ordinarily, /Death/ is not to be construed literally, as they have it in the movies.It is usually associated with major changes in the querent’s life, even quite benevolent ones.But in the Golgotha deck, with /Death/ on Baphomet’snose, the immenent demise of the querent is practically assured. Other than its antiquity , this is one of the reasons the Golgotha is so rare. Both furious querents and Church authorities burned most of the original decks.And modern companies want to make a buck.Better for them to print cards in which /Death/ is a metaphor and /The Devil/ is only a state of mind.But back to poor doomed Professor Temple.
>
> “Oh dear,” I said, looking over the spread.“This is quite bad for you.”
>
> “Rubbish!” he said angrily.“I’ve been in this field for years.It all means something else with the Tarot.It’s not death and misfortune, it’s all growth and transformation, that kind of thing.”
>
> “Not so true with the Golgotha,” I said.
>
> “What of /The Papess/ ?” he challenged.“There! She’s merciful, just look at her face!”
>
> “She’s between Baphomet’s horns,” I said.“That’s not so bad.But she’s inverted, and that intensifiesyour plight.”
>
> “But both /The Empress/ and /The Emperor/--!“ he began.
>
> “Are also inverted,” I said.They are the guarantors of life:bound andsilenced. And see this V made by the /Three/, /Seven/and /Ten/ /of Scythes/? That’s called ‘Brutus’ Dagger’. From now on, you must think of every day as the Ides of March.”
>
> Furious and scared, he pointed a quaking finger at me.
>
> “You sir,”he said vehemently, “are a liar and a charlatan! And I possess the means to prove it!”
>
> With a barely controlled fury, he pulled the stopper out of the glass tube and withdrew the oculis. He held the blue lens before his right eye and peered at me through it, like some occult Sherlock. He breathed in angry equine snorts and his face was red as a beet.Then all at once his mouth dropped open in shockand the high color drained from his face. He lowered the oculis, trembling.
>
> “Why, you’re a, you’re a great--” he gasped.Then he slid the oculis back in its case, stoppered it, rose in a panic and stumbled out of Herne’s Lair.”
>
> “You see, Turd,” Master Klinghoffer said.“He had gazed at me with the /Eye of Chartres/ and seen my true power. He had seen that I was only telling him the truth, speaking it from the heart of that power.And while earlier I had perceivedthe power of the Golgotha Tarot, I knew nowthat it would be the key to mine.”
>
> “I was now hot and giddy with excitement, and I soon followed Professor Temple out of the pub. And so we encountered each other a third and last time.But one of us was not alive to the significance of the meeting.”
>
> Master Klinghoffer burbled.
>
> “Professor Temple, in fact, was not alive to anything.He lay dead in the parking lot, apparently of a heart attack.The oculis lay at his side, its glass case shattered.I ran in to tell the barman the sad news.But first, I retrieved the oculis from its bed of shards.It wouldn’t do, Turd,to leave such a priceless thing where any idiot might step on it.And the oculis, by a telling miracle, was still unbroken.It was as if I had been meant to take it.”
>
> “I flew home with my first treasures,swollen with success. But it wasn’t pleasant, Turd.It was like having an erection with nowhere to put it.
> But I soon found the right lady! In fact, I found her on the plane.”
>
> “It was the week before Easter of 1984, and the stewardesses on my flight were wearing little hats, little bunny ears. They were giving out chocolate eggs to the passengers.And as I unwrapped the foil on my egg and bit into it, I understood that I must consult the Golgotha on Easter Sunday.”
>
> My master pronounced the word “Easter” the same way a prissy proctologist might have pronounced the word “anus”.
>
> “Listen now, Turd,” he continued gravely, waving a fat index finger,“because I’m about to tell you something crucial about the Backward Magus. It isn’t pretty or noble or nice.It is a truth about the world and our place in it. And you must embrace this truth if you would succeed on this path. If you reject this truth, you are a sweet coward and I have no further use for you.But if you accept it, you may yet learn to walk backwards through a mirror.”
>
> He had spoken of this mystery once before, when we had met at a party for the Winter Solstice of the previous year.It is the single resonant phrase which had drawnme into apprenticeship with him. I had wept, screamed, bled, eaten spiders and certain other thingsto penetrate its dense glamour. I would not forsake it now.
>
> “Magister, yes!” I said fervently. “What is thetruth?”
>
> He rose, poured whiskey from a new bottle and returned to his seat.
> After drinking half the glass, while I watched him with a mixture of anticipation and annoyance, he revealed the central mystery of the Backward Way.
>
> “Turd,” he said,“we go to the restaurant.We order an eleven course meal, with wines and breads and puddings and pheasant under glass.Afterwards, we smoke the finest cigars and sip rare aperitifs. We talk long into the night.Then we rise, claim our coats and go home to sleep.”
>
> There was a long pause.Perhaps, I thought,Master Klinghoffer would tell how we rose in the morning and returned to the same establishment for a sumptuous breakfast. Perhaps he was teaching me that we must enjoy ourselves at all costs, whatever the world might do or say.The Backward Way was arduous, after all, and we must take our comforts when we could.
> It was a preparation, a necessary reflection before going on to the great mystery. Now he would reveal that terrible truth.
>
> But two minutes became three minutes became five and I finally realized that the great mystery had just been revealed, or at least indicated.
>
> “Is it a parable?” I finally asked, a little desperately.
>
> “Turd,” he said with the pursing of the lips which meant that I was being extraordinarily obtuse.“What have we not done? We have eaten and drunk our fill, smoked and talked late into the evening. The maitre d’
> has seen us out the door with a cheery wave and a plea for us to return the following night. But we have not paid the bill.”
>
> “Oh,” I said.And:“Ohhh!”
>
> Master Klinghoffer continued, not cross with me now, but enjoying the professorial mode.
>
> “The black magician,” he said, “never pays.He orders whatever he likes from the menu and delicacies are then served to him steaming on ivory plates. But only children believe in a free meal.There are cosmic laws, and the first one decrees that Someone must pay the bill. But it is notstipulated who must pay it.And the restaurant owner does not care.Because the truth is that he’s an amoraljunkie who only keeps the restaurant going to support his habit.That is the cosmic flaw that we exploit, Turd.Others are sentimental about the restaurant and its proprietor. They order the cheap dishes and pay with cash. But black magicians dine on pheasant and another diner pays.Because they know that there is really no restaurant andthe junkie overdosed long ago. There is really only a hole in the world, Turd.And we reach into that hole to draw out golden honey.”
>
> Smarter than the average bear, I thought, and then said it.
>
> “Yes,” he said, pondering.“Yogi Bear was a greatAdept of the Backward Art. And his apprentice, of course, was Boo Boo.
>
> He burbled, like subterranean oil spurting from a hole in the blackest earth.
>
> “It was the Golgotha Tarot which taught me all of this. And it lead me to my lucky diner.
>
> “As I recall, there was some unpleasantness upon my return from London.The Easter Bunny was going to be at the Tacoma Mall from Good Friday through EasterSunday, for games and family portraits. Sheila was fanatical about the portrait.And little Noel screamed that Daddy should meet the Easter Bunny too.But I had to prepare for my Golgotha reading.
> This was all for them as well as myself, remember!”
>
> Master Klinghoffer suddenly sounded very aggrieved.
>
> “I patiently explained to Noel that the Easter Bunny was really an angry underpaid young man in a sweaty horrible suit. And that instead of pretending that a sweaty horrible man was really a miraculous rodent, Daddy had to do things which would make us all rich.
>
> “Sheila was furious.How could I trample on the magic of childhood like that, she wanted to know, me of all people! And I told her that there was real magic and fake magic and that I would spend Easter holiday doing the first kind. Sheila screeched that I was very clever about my strange mysteries but a blockhead about the most obvious things.Then the Witch Queen of Alaska Street took her son to stay with her mother.I couldn’t have devised things better if I’d called on the Doctor of Hooks to drag them out of the house for me.”
>
> That laughter again, like oil or black water bubbling under a rock. Then a flat look came over his face and he turned away.
>
> “I hope he had fun that day,” he said in a hollow voice. Then he turned back to me.
>
> “I won’t belabor you with the prep work for the great reading,” he said.“Certain excruciations are associated with the Golgotha, and one must come to it with terror and purified by suffering.”
>
> “But how did you suffer in the English pub?” I asked.“I thought we never had to pay.”
>
> “The Golgotha,” he said,“lays outside our path, outside all paths, and makes its own demands. As for payment, I shedtears with interest for thatSurrey reading, and more for the reading to come. By Easter morning I was a hollow vessel,prepared to be filled with Golgothic visions. And I was not disappointed.What the Golgotha spoke to me was a reading of terrifying symmetry and elegance.
>
> “I asked my question:what must I do to end this life of a bankruptcy clerk, to trade my life of beer and pretzelsfor one of steak and whiskey?Trembling, I laid out eleven cards in the Baphomet spread./The Moon/ ruled the left horn, /The Sun/ ruled the right andmy significator, /The Emperor/, stood between them. /The Magician/, inverted, rode the left ear and the /Three of Crowns/ was on the right./The Chariot/ held Baphomet’s beard, flanked by the /Seven of Staves/ and the /Seven of Grails/.And the /Three/, /Seven/ and /Tenof Scythes/ appeared again, suggesting Brutus’s Dagger.
>
> “If you knew the Tarot the way I do, Turd, you would instantly know that this spread was one of duality, a spread that spoke of twins. For I, the inverted /Magician/ as well as /The Emperor/, am ruled by /The Moon/.
> And the /Seven of Staves/, with its seven flying arrows, clearly referred to my flight to London.My twin was on the right side, ruled by /The Sun/. Represented by the /Three of Crowns/, He was a tradesman of some kind, and the /Seven of Grails/ indicated that he would travel by water.
>
> “But the last card, the one towards which the whole spread pointed, was /The Hanged Man/.And he invariably represents a sacrifice.
>
> “Once I had established the players and their issues, the rest was a parlor game, a matter of the simplest deduction.In order for the magician to end the life of beer and pretzels, the tradesman would need to be sacrificed to Brutus’s Dagger. /The Moon/ would conquer /The Sun/:an eclipse.
>
> “What about /The Chariot/?” I asked.“You left that out.”
>
> Something about this story, or the manner of its telling, made me want to pokeholes in it. But Master Klinghoffer was unfazed by my frail quibble.
>
> “Travel again, Turd,” he said.“Also, mystical twinship, as represented by the white and black horses.It was all very succinct. A date was even given, or nearly.There were all of these sevens, threes and tens.Ten was very significant.”
>
> “Why not thirteen?” I asked.“Or seventeen?”
>
> “Thirteen,” he rasped, catching on to my fencingmood now and not liking it at all, “underlines /The Hanged Man/.It is the odd man out.It is the number of sacrifice.”
>
> Master Klinghoffer hadn’t accountedfor seventeen, though, and I felt relieved. A certain suffocating perfection had been averted.
>
> “But, he continued,“the spread said nothing of how the sacrifice would be accomplished. I considered another deal of the cards to determine this,But further thought made it unnecessary. If /The Hanged Man/ had been in any other position, it might have suggested a sacrifice yet unfulfilled. But as the last card, a major trump on Baphomet’s nose,it spoke of an unavoidable condition.Like the death of Professor Temple, it was already accomplished.
>
> “But it is part of the magician’s art to know when something is being said even when it is not being spoken. Or perhaps it was the /Three of Crowns/, suggesting a labor to be performed.Or it might have been /The Chariot/, implying a final travail. In any case, I knew that the sacrifice would take place. But to secure my free meal, I would need to put my restaurant bill on my lucky diner’s table; I would need to make him my scapegoat. And that lead me to my greatest feat of speculomancy.
>
> “Scapegoating, Turd, comes from the ancient Jewish custom of putting the sins of the tribe upon a single male goat and driving it into the wilderness. This was done on the holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On the Hebrew calendar, Yom Kippur is observed on the tenth day of Tishrei, which that year fell in October.”
>
> The tenth day of the tenth month, I thought:perfect and appalling.
>
> “When Yom Kippur came,” he went on, “ I sequestered myself in the house and sent Sheila and the boy to stay with her mother.I told them I was observing a special Jewish custom this year and shouldn’t be disturbed.
> It was true, after all, or true enough, anyway.And they bought it.
>
> “For the Yom Kippur working, I had purchased the cheapestsecond-hand suit I could find. I had also prepared a tall mirror, using sour wine and the blood of catsto consecrate my enterprise in the name of our lord,the Shattered Prince.
>
> “After seeing Sheila and Noel out the door, I took lipstick and scrawled “/Three of Crowns/” at the mirror’sface level. I spat upon it, and scribbled other things besides, doodles and obsceneties ofthe most childish kind. I covered the mirror with them, singing “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” at the top of my lungs. It was outrageous fun!
>
> “Then, after meditating on my image in the defiled glass, I smashed it witha ball peen hammer, aiming for the face. This was also hugely entertaining, though I cut my hands in my enthusiasm. I used the blood to smear an inverted pentagram on seven of the shards.Singing “Mad Dogs”
> all the while, I collected the broken glass and stuffed it into the suit. With a sense of ritual flourish, I further soiledmy magical doppleganger and stuffed the whole smelly shattered affair into the suit bag.
>
> “If I had not been married, I would have hung it up in my closet. But confident in the efficacy of my working, I opted for marital concord and buried the thing in the backyard. I shoveled dirtwith a rendition of “Mad Dogs” so mournful it would have made my namesake weep.
>
> “I was in my twenties then and still thought magical meant the same thing as instant.I knew I had been successful the same way an actor may know the strength of his performance long before the reviews come out. I expected to receive a mysterious check in the mail.Or perhaps a wealthyunknown relative would die and leave me his fortune.But magical time is not ordinary time.It is more like dreaming, in which you may experience the same moment stretched over a number of years, or you may live many years in a single night. So I lived many years in the following year and they all had the quality of a nightmare.
>
> “I lost my job at the bankruptcy court and couldn’t find a job to match even that dismal position. I delivered phone books and pizzas while Sheila answered phones for an insurance salesman. We barely had enough money for macaroni, let alone the cheese to go on it.And then there were Noel’s doctor bills. He had become anemic and suffered from frequent infections. He missed many school days and we had to pay a babysitter.
>
> In addition to everything else, I started returning scrounged pop bottles to make ends meet.So it went for that annus horribilis. And then, a year after my Yom Kippur ritual, my lucky diner finally paid the bill.
>
> “It was shortly after midnight and I had had a humiliating day of bearing pizzas untothe ungrateful masses.I sat on the couch with a beer, watchingour battered Magnavox with a sense of wonder and triumph.
> Palestinian patriots had hijacked a cruise ship called the Achille Lauro.After quarreling with him, they had shot a disabled passenger and thrownhis body overboard. The passenger was a 69 year old appliance manufacturer named Leon Klinghoffer. The date was the seventh of October.”
>
> Seventeen, I thought, and wanted to vomit. But Noel Klinghoffer was relentless.
>
> “I closed my eyes,” he said,“and bowed my headto the Shattered Prince.I imagined Leon Klinghoffer swollen with my sins, bearing them down to the bottom of the Aegean Sea. I felt like a kite, an eagle, rising above the shabby fabric of empty bottles and bankruptcies which had made up my life until then.I would pisson my enemies and giggleat their sorrows. I would smoke cigars rolled from extinct tobaccos and keep a harem.I would wear rings of gold and orichalcum. I was the King of the World.
>
> “Shortly afterward, Noel died of leukemia, and I wept many, many nights that there was neither magic nor medicine that could have cured him. I loved that boy, Turd.Perhaps I should have gone with him to see the Easter Bunny after all.”
>
> Master Klinghoffer looked away then. Very dramatic. When he turned back to me, a single sluggish tear slid down his fat left cheek.
>
> “But one of the things a magician learns,” he said, “is when to distinguish magic from the relentless machineries of the world. There are some things, Turd,like disease and old age and divorce, which magic can do nothing about.”
>
> He drew a great breath then, as if he had long been submerged in the truth and now gaspedfor the lie that sustained him.
>
> “Some things, Turd,” he said, “are just a coincidence.”
>
> with those words, Master Klinghoffer folded his hands on his great belly, tucked his chin on his chest and fell asleep.
>
> When he did this, it always fell on me to rouse the mystical behemoth and herd him to his bedroom door. But this opportunity would never occur again. I could look through the Golgotha myself now, see what/The Magician/ looked like, or /The Hanged Man/ or Professor Temple’s benign ineffectual /papess/. More intriguingly, I could take up the oculis and study Master Klinghoffer through it, see the sight that had exploded the poor Professor’s heart.
>
> I reached for the golden wand and trembled. What would be revealed by the /Eye of Chartres/? Some monster, some devouring thing, some bloated hominoid spider with a thousand mouths?I grasped the oculis and raised it to my right eye.
>
> But before I could focus properly through the blue lens, I dropped it again.Perhaps it was terror;maybe I just feared a heart attack. But unaided by any magic,I looked at the snoring magician and considered.I briefly thought of brightly painted Easter eggs. Then I walked away from the house of Noel Klinghoffer.
>
> “Alexander,” I said to myself, “it’s time to go dancing.”
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 


"Oh, Sophie!  Whyfore have you eated all de cheeldren?"