The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow Read Free Book Online

still had my own business and reputation to maintain. The mammon in me? Not really. But being the only female diviner in the region, reputation was everything. With the exception of Madame Beausoleil and those occasional others, diviners were until recent times traditionally men, going back to the sixteenth century when Agricola wrote of miners using the
virgula furcata
to search for gold. I didn't dare admit, even to my mentor, that I believed I myself was a mere charlatan blessed with odd good luck. I had mouths to feed and a house that forever needed paint. It was too late for me to consider any other vocation than the ones to which I had devoted my life. Neither divining nor my part-time teaching would alone satisfy the monthly mortgage, modest though it was, never mind my sons' appetites, which weren't. So I cobbled together a living as best I could. No going back, fake or not.
    The thing was, for whatever little techniques I had developed to enhance my chances of, as it were, swimming along with the Brookses—my own confession will come in due course—nothing I had ever done could explain my fore visions, as we called them in our family. Forevisions, of which there had been many more than the one about my brother, though forevision had utterly failed me in divining Nep's condition. I had been a self-doubter behind my witching stick, but technique couldn't explain how sometimes I just knew what logic would lead me to believe I shouldn't know. The two worlds of diviner and seer felt different to me, but like the prongs of a dowsing rod itself, there was some unifying connection between them. I had walked out on both limbs but couldn't swear I understood either. Was the hanged girl some forevision I couldn't yet translate into meaning? The very idea left me suddenly exhausted and wired at the same time. I didn't want the monster back ruining my life. The monster: shorthand from my youth for a state of mind I couldn't avoid, understand, or bear.
    Words such as
patience,
forward or backward, and
virgula
—words Nep had known so well—now eluded him every once in a while, as if they were butterflies and his net had holes in it, flaws in its webbing he didn't know how to fix. I wondered if he remembered the word
halcyon.
Not that many people would know it in the first place, unless they'd been forced to. It was in my thoughts tonight for good reason, jogged there unwittingly by one of Niles's questions. A word I hadn't considered for the longest time, Halcion carried a real resonance for me in my mid-teens. Widely prescribed in the eighties, the drug was later proven, for all its benefits of inducing sleep in troubled insomniac souls such as mine, to drive some to the edge of the edge, and yet others right over. I don't remember ever having apocalyptic feelings when I was, as I privately named it,
halcyoned.
Yet I do recall more than once having an impossible conversation with Christopher when everyone else in the house was still slumbering.
    What's it like there in the land of the dead, Chris?
    Like nothing, like floating in warm flowers.
    Can you see me?
    There's nothing to see except your worries and hopes.
    What do they look like?
    Knives hovering over you.
    The hopes, too?
    The hopes especially.
    These dreams were as vivid to me then as the smell of my red wine and the distant, majestic hooting of a great horned owl counterpointing the Duke felt to me now, sitting on the night-chilled porch. They had been so real to me, in fact, that I occasionally lapsed by mentioning them during casual conversation with my parents, who were naturally alarmed. Their concerns over my mental health became an incessant subject for a time. Switching doctors was their approach when things didn't seem to be improving. After Nep refused even to consider allowing some priest-friend of Mother's to perform an exorcism, they turned to Dr. McGruder, the next in a string of psychiatrists in the city I wound up visiting once a week. He