“You have a witch lineage?” he asked, so damn cocksure about everything before him.
My stomach plummeted as I realised exactly what he was asking. The notion that Emily and Richard Rand had some ties to the Occult was laughable.
“My grandma follows the Hoodoo religion,” Zoey offered helpfully, only it wasn’t helpful, not in the slightest.
My throat closed up, the panic seizing me in a way that had me faltering. Was this it? The universe was offering me the branch of friendship only to retract it because I didn’t have the right lineage? I hiccuped to cover up the building sob that had lodged itself firmly in my throat. Dizziness swept through me.
“Me neither,” Charl grinned, and just like that, my fears had been laid to rest.
He patted the ground and I joined him, breathing in the smell of the earth and cedar trees as he flipped through his deck, pulling out every card within the major arcana, explaining its meaning and its reverse meaning. Occasionally, Zoey offered her own interpretation, but soon she grew tired or bored and left to find Marie.
His explanation was Magick incarnate. It was watching the very essence of it drip from his lips as he weaved a tale of varying threads of probabilities, and the creation of something similar to a coven. I fell into the madness and lure of it all when he told me that both he, and Zoey, had felt that same Magick thrum through my veins, signaling me as something different, something other - not odd, but special, unique in ways that I had never dreamed. It was the kind of information that lost little girls dreamed of, a sense of belonging that screamed through the very core of my being. We’ve been found.
Of course it helped that there had been a rightness to his words, that my intuition or instinct didn’t call bullshit on the tale he fed me, instead it swallowed it down whole, gluttonous on the possibility of more.
Naturally, I wasn’t the only girl that Charl had sought out. There was always more of us, if you were willing to look. We flocked to him, demanding to learn more Magick, to breathe in more of its essence. Charl thrived on the research and instruction aspect of Magick, and soon, we began excelling at casting and reading. It was the start of our little Club.
Having grown up around various carnivals and circus acts, Charl seemed to hold an unending amount of knowledge about the Occult and all things Magick. And being the charmer that he was, quickly dubbed himself the Magician - and honestly, the Club name suits - the man literally breathes Magick. In building the Club, he gifted us each our own deck, and to this day, I still don't know where he nicked them from.
That was how, at the tender age of fourteen, I became a Tarot reader.
The fire crackled as we huddled around the flames the following summer, only this time, we were all actively looking for the figures within the flames. The ground beneath my bare feet was damp, but we had all learned to welcome the feel of dirt between our toes, the nature of grounding required it. The open sky above us loosened something within my soul, a giggle burbled up my throat as I watched Zoey, in all her wildness throw her head back and howl to the moon in imitation of a werewolf. I was giddy, high on the Magick of these people, and the Magick within myself. My laughter was a splutter of stops and starts as if my body didn’t quite understand what I was demanding of it, but soon, I tossed my own head back, my limp locks falling free from the pins I had placed in my hair with such precision, and howled to the moon. My body required movement, my feet itched to dance, the voice demanded song, and when I glanced around the fire, I realised I wasn’t alone, and soon, as if we were one, we were up and dancing along with the figures in the flames themselves. Charl was the only one who didn’t dance, he stood back, a wry smile tugging at his lips as he praised our feminine energy, encouraging us to recharge ourselves through it. A sacred circle of pure womanhood. The water from the lake beckoned us, and Marie tugged my hand, dragging me towards the lake - towards the water, just as the circle settled back down. We climbed into one of the little rowing boats that had been docked to the side, and pushed ourselves off into the water. My fingertips skimmed the surface, the mere act of touching the water was invigorating and I felt something deep within me unlock.
Marie’s laughter echoed over the water and my own responding laughter was that of pure joy. Her and I seemed to both have an affinity with water, and wasn’t that absolutely exhilarating?
Looking back now, I realised that we had unwittingly created an alter, using the earth’s essence, the water from the lake, the crackle from the flames, and the breeze from the wind. It had all been there. Throw in some Witch energy and I was surprised that the only thing we had summoned were dancing figures in the flame.
It took a few summers, but soon our group boasted twelve members, each of us adopting a Club name from the major arcana. I envied my gawkey fourteen year old self. The act of falling in love with Magick itself would be my finest experience, of that I had no doubt.
It wasn't an easy group. We did not all automatically get along simply because we were learning how to wield Magick, no, in fact there was a lot of rivalry with small groups and cliques forming within the Club itself.
And yet, no one held back when it came time to share our personal experiences with Magick in our time away from the camp. I giggled fiercely as Marie swore that she had cursed some girl in her class for being a prized cow, which amounted to her pencil continuously breaking each time they wrote a test.
Or when Max, sharing how she had fashioned her first sour jar, hexing her stepfather, her dark eyes looking up through the black sheet of her bangs, speaking of far more pain and angst than she was willing to verbalise.
Or how Charl grinned, handing each of us the foot of a chicken, explaining how it could be used in Brazilian Magick with Marie jumping up and down, flailing at the fact that she had touched it.
But Magick was both life and death, it was luck and curses, it was light and dark. It could never be solely one thing, no matter how much we wished it.
I was dubbed The Empress. I often wondered at this - if I wasn't simply given the title because I was young, impressionable, and came from a wealthy family. Whilst the deeper meaning of The Empress spoke of creation, motherhood, fertility, and even love, I couldn’t connect with any of those things. And so, I had to largely believe that I was The Empress on a superficial level. My love for music and water could hardly be compared to the creation of the human essence and its art. And really, what did I know about love? I chose to believe Charl and my friends, placing my faith in them that I was indeed The Empress of our Club, and that I did boast those qualities, even if they were buried so deeply within that they were yet to emerge.
The name somehow didn't fit. It seemed too big - too grand - for me. In my entire life, I had never created anything truly meaningful, and therein lay the problem. I didn't feel like an Empress. I didn't feel powerful. Yes, I felt the Magick beating in time with my heart, but that didn't make up for the fact that I largely felt like a fraud.
My closest friends - Jesse - The Fool, Marie - The High Priestess, Zoey - The Star, and Max - The Tower, stood as my highest confidantes. They could not have been more different, and I loved them equally. Jesse was bright and funny. Marie was soft and worldly. Zoey could do anything she put her mind to. And Max? She was always striving to do better, to be more somehow - as if her Club name was a mark against her.
Perhaps it was due to my upbringing and the fact that my mother plied me with the need to be cordial at all times, but for the most part, I was friendly with all the girls in the group, but these four were my closest allies. And as part of that whispered pact we spoke over the singing campfire so long ago, I would lay down my life to protect the Tarot Club and its members - even when we were at odds.
After my first summer with them, I had made the mistake of telling my mother that I had befriended Charl. She was appalled, calling him both a heathen and a gypsy. She demanded I disassociate with him, threatening to cancel any future Summer Camp experiences entirely. I didn't fight them. I didn't even defend Charl out of fear that any defense would be seen as defiance of them and then, they truly would halt the camp experience entirely. I simply nodded my understanding, made up a fictional girl called Felicia that I spent my time with, and continued to spend my summers with Charl and the Club.
Naturally, Charl was the only male in our group, waxing lyrically that we (the females) were more in touch with the divine, and therefore, were naturally better spellcasters and Tarot readers. Sometimes I thought he was right, sometimes I thought he was just plain lazy, and other times (if I was being perfectly honest), I thought he was crazy and thrived on the fact that he was the only male among us, the knowledge fuelling his Magick in some disturbed way.
Dabbling in the dark arts of Magick could do that. You had to have a foot planted firmly in both worlds, and sometimes the balance could become precarious. That’s not to say that you weren’t speaking the truth or even seeing it, it was more about getting the truth from the different realms muddled. Additionally, this balance required all kinds of protection. This is where the stories of someone possessed by Magick streaking naked through their neighbourhood stemmed from. It often came down to protection - did they have enough protection? Were they grounding continually? Were they dabbling between dark and light? It all played a factor.
Zoey sat outside Charl’s cabin door, her face marked with exhaustion.
“You want me to take over?” I asked.
I had lost count with the amount of time I offered.