Crossover Earth '98
Mundane/Arcane Ken St. Andre
1.
On the evening of his 50th birthday Gene Tanders sat at home with a bottle of cold duck, nine jasmine-scented white candles, and a well-worn Rider-Waite tarot deck. The walls of his apartment were lined with hundreds of books about the occult, especially those that dealt with tarot. There were popular paperbacks from Llewellyn along with small press publications from the Theosophists. There were books in German and French along with those in English. Between the bookcases were framed prints of the Major Arcana, notably The Fool, Strength, the Hanged Man, and The World. Stewart Kaplan's Encyclopedia of the Tarot was too large to go in any bookcase, and so it rested on a handmade book stand.
Gene sat cross-legged like a Hindu swami before his home-made altar. He was wearing only a bathrobe--as close as he could come to a robe without knots or buckles on it. The only light in the room came from the flickering candles at each corner of the altar and on bookcases at the sides of the room. Shadows fluttered across the large cards he had set up against the backboard of the altar. From left to right the cards included The Fool, The Magician, Judgment, and The World.
He was meditating on the Meanings and Powers of each Card. He had been doing this for over an hour. The process went like this: drink a glass of wine, concentrate upon a card as long as he could, then drink another glass of wine and concentrate upon the next card. He was already more than half drunk.
At the moment he was concentrating upon the naked blonde goddess who represented the Totality of Existence--the World with all its Pleasures and Temptations.
The goddess stepped out of the card and grew until she was as large as he was. Gene's jaw dropped and his blood began to race. Was this a dream?
"Gene Tanders," said the goddess in a voice like honey. "You are a Fool!"
"Uh, Yes," he croaked in surprise.
"But the Powers have need of Fools! And Fools have need of Powers!" Gene suddenly found himself in a tunic and tights with a staff and a bag on the floor beside him.
"Arf! Arf!" A cute little white dog leaped into his lap and began licking his face. It tickled so much that he couldn't help but laugh. Gladness and amazement surged through him, and he didn't know why.
The World Goddess smiled. Then her face grew stern. "Yes, you have done it," she said gravely. "You are at this moment the Fool, and you have his Powers and Attributes."
"I don't understand," said Gene.
"There is much Evil in the world," said the goddess. "You have always wished to fight it. The Powers have decided to grant your wish."
"What do you mean?" cried Gene. The little dog and fool's motley vanished, leaving him once again in an old burgundy bathrobe.
The goddess remained. "We have given you the power to actualize the archetypes of the tarot," she said. "When you stare at a tarot card and think of how it could help you, it will, but only for a short time--five minutes or less. You do not have the power to maintain the actualization for longer than that."
"This is but a drunken dream," Gene protested, though he no longer felt the slightest bit woozy.
"This is no dream, but deadly reality," said the goddess, as she began to shrink and grow two-dimensional once more. "Always keep a tarot deck with you, and when you need help, shuffle and cut a card at random. Remember, you need only stare at a card and wish for it to help you to invoke your powers." She stepped back onto the card, and was only a printed image once more.
"This is a dream," muttered Gene. "I'll pinch myself and wake up. Ouch!"
"I won't remember this in the morning," said Gene. He got up and gathered the cards back into the deck. Then he blew out the candles and staggered off to bed.
But, in the morning his first glance at the tarot deck on the altar brought it all back to him. Acting on a hunch, or following instructions, he picked up the deck of cards and slipped it into the deep left pocket of his suit jacket. After a brief breakfast, he put on his coat and was off to his job at the city library.
2.