Major Arcana is a serialized novel for paid subscribers. For more details, both about the novel and about subscriber amenities, please see the Preface. Because this chapter works as a standalone short story and can therefore serve well as a preview of the novel for free subscribers and general browsers, I am not paywalling it for now. It’s dark, but please enjoy! PART TWO Chapter 3. | The High Priestess Simon Magnus ended up in Valerie Karns’s house that night. Not far from the Magnuses’ dark house, but on the other side of the dark forest, it sat behind a crumbling, graffiti-bright train trestle in a cul-de-sac. In that dead end squatted a crowded warren of small houses where the labor force of the town’s bygone industries had once worked. Now, anyone might live there, amid the overgrown lawns and cars on cement blocks and grime-blackened siding—anyone who couldn’t afford to live anywhere better. Valerie Karns lived alone with her mother, a hairdresser by day and bartender by night. Her mother was gone from the house from seven in the morning to midnight, except for the nights she spent in the bedroom upstairs of the bar, plying yet a third trade. Valerie Karns had discovered magic a few years earlier, when her former stepfather—he’d managed the hardware store next to the bar where her mother worked—still lived in the house. He would visit her bedroom during the long nights when her mother was out. She pretended to sleep, her back to the door, one of the many cats who lived in the house pressed purring to her chest, when he came in. His lowering bulk made the mattress sink; she would roll, unless she clutched the corner of the mattress by her fingernails, into his lap. His silver-furred paunch like the back of a gorilla, the beer on his breath like sour pennies, the way the air whistled in one hairy nostril, the way his rough fingers—the nails permanently grimed in black oil—stroked her back with cajoling affection: these tormented her, sleeping and waking. The cat would shriek, would leap from the bed. She never made a sound. She would regularly climb the sagging wooden steps that gave pedestrians access to the trestle above the train tracks. She read the graffiti, never knowing what it meant—bright bloody hearts ringed with runes—and imagined leaping down onto a train and letting it either kill her or carry her somewhere, anywhere: elsewhere.  She would walk from the public school to the public library: a pale gray building with a high red door, the vault of its lofty ceiling braced and crossed with wooden beams, its windows tall and colored like church windows, said to be the oldest building in the state. She felt cradled in its breadth. She would stay there until it closed, with the excuse of extracurricular activities and class projects. It wouldn’t save her from the nightly visitations, but it spared her more time with her stepfather than was strictly demanded by his power and her powerlessness.  One night, leaving the library at eight o’clock, she spied him driving up and down the streets, looking for her, looking for her mother, looking for whatever else he might put his filthy fingers on. She ran back into the building and hurried unobserved to the bathrooms. She crouched on the seat of the last toilet in the ladies’ room during the final inspection. When the librarians locked the building and left, she climbed down, stiff-kneed, and spent the night in the library.  It took hardly a minute to cross the whole one-room building—frigid on a fall night—that had housed the library for what to her, at age 12, in a bewildering and almost unnavigable universe, might as well have been hundreds or thousands of years. The oldest building in the state. Did it go back to Pilgrim times? Every school year, they started again at the Pilgrims. She had memorized the required facts of history. She had a good memory: she did well in school, since they didn’t ask much else of her but her memory