Work Text
Statement of Isabella Ward, regarding an incident with a package given to her at her storefront in Cambridge. Original statement received May 20th, 2016, but written September 12th, 2006, reportedly having gotten lost in the mail. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Statement begins.
I don’t know why I’m writing this to you lot. I really don’t. I understand that mailed statements are quite… irregular, to say the least. But when I first visited the Institute, I was still too shaken to be able to write anything down. The woman at the front desk told me they could make an exception, and that I could mail it to them when I was ready. So that’s what I’m doing now.
I should probably start at the beginning. I work at a crystal shop, you see, with my sister. I’m a firm believer in the healing properties of crystals and performing readings with tarot cards, all of that. Most think that it’s bogus, but I believe in it.
At least, I did. Now I know better, and that much more powerful entities exist and pull the strings this and that way, using us as pawns in some sick, twisted game for their entertainment.
It all started last month, about mid August. As well as selling crystals, my sister and I receive donations of magical objects. Charged crystal wands, crystal balls, old tarot decks, that sort of thing.
Well, that weekend, a strange man walked into the shop. We do get a lot of strange customers, from hippies well versed in tarot and crystal usage to hyper-religious missionaries trying to convert us from “the devil”. There is no devil in what we do, but just… a natural assistance to those who need it.
This man was a different kind of strange. He looked to be in his early 20’s, with dark brown skin, buzzed hair, and piercing yellow eyes. He had a generally stoic face, like someone who had been through the military, that kind of lot, but he just felt… off. I can’t describe it. Maybe it’s because we don’t get many military folks in this area, or maybe it was his eyes. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.
He came in holding this small, black box. It looked to be made of a sort of smooth plastic, with a crudely drawn eye on the lid in white chalk, having six eyelashes pointing out in all directions. I still have the box. Couldn’t bring myself to burn it along with what was inside. I’ll send it with this letter, I think.
I asked him what the box was, and he just stared blankly at me, before speaking in a thick, Scottish accent. He said “True magic comes with a cost. The future is hardly as good as we think it to be.”
I asked him to elaborate, but the man said nothing, and just walked out the door, leaving the box on the counter. It had a sort of… dark energy to it. I could feel it thrumming in my bones, yet couldn’t help but be drawn to it.
I opened the box. Of course I opened the bloody box. I should have left it. I should have burned it before it killed my sister.
Inside the box, was a worn deck of tarot cards, unlike any I’ve ever seen before. The cards were dusted in gold, and the drawings of the major and minor arcana were etched into the surface in an inky black. I could feel the engravings of the outlines like it was a stamp. They felt heavier than tarot cards were supposed to be, the entire deck together weighing similar to a cement brick.
They had a strange… allure to them that I just couldn’t ignore. The words of the stranger had intrigued me, and so had this deck. I had to use it.
I wish I didn’t.
The first reading I did with the deck was for my friend Lucy Barne. She gets regular readings from me. I knew she didn’t believe in it, but she knew I did, and had always found the topic intriguing.
While I was doing the reading, a strange feeling overcame me. Words flowing through my head and out my mouth, as if I were a host for something unspeakable.
I told her that her future was limited, that she’d be crushed under the weight of a grey 2002 Ford Thunderbird, going too fast for her to avoid.
Lucy had laughed, thinking that I was joking with her.
I don’t blame her. Readings don’t happen that way. It was more specific than any reading I had ever performed in my seven years of doing them. But I knew it wasn’t any reading of mine.
I put the cards away, and the thrumming that the cards sent through me had vanished, as if it was never there. We laughed it off, though it was unnerving, and she was off.
Just as she had started walking down the crosswalk, a grey car, going way faster than it should have been, rammed straight into her.
A grey 2002 Ford Thunderbird.
I should have stopped using the deck after that. But something compelled me to keep going, to keep using the deck as if it was some sort of drug that I couldn’t escape from. One by one, my clients dropped like flies.
Mountain climbing incident.
Food poisoning.
Stabbed to death in an alley.
One right after the other. No matter how bad the outcome was, I just couldn’t stop using it. The feeling of the cards in my hands as my clients pulled their dastardly fate had a sense of thrill that I had never felt before, something exciting. I think I had convinced myself that what was happening wasn’t my fault. That it would happen anyways, and I was just the messenger.
That was before my sister Molly had asked for a reading.
She was about to get married to her fiancee, Phillip, and was feeling nervous about the wedding. So she turned to me for the reading.
I should have just used the normal cards. They were right there, I could have just grabbed them. But I grabbed the box and used the deck from the black box.
She had pulled her first card. Major Arcana 13. Death. Usually signifies an end to something. A relationship, a job, something important. They don’t call it a major arcana for nothing.
This did nothing for Molly’s anxiety, so I suggested she pull another card to figure out what it was supposed to end.
Her fingers only brushed the deck before she started to scream.
The skin of her fingertips was shriveling like a prune, spreading across her hand and up her arm, before stretching tight against the muscles under her skin. They bulged and squirmed under her skin as the grey spread up to the rest of her body like a wildfire, causing her to start spasaming uncontrollably, knocking the deck out of my hand and onto the floor.
Within moments, she had stopped, slumping down in the chair. I knew she was dead. I scrambled for my phone and called 999, desperate to get someone to help.
Once the call had ended, I picked up the cards that had fallen, and one of them had landed face up.
Major Arcana 15. The Devil.
I burned the cards after that. It’s the proper way to get rid of a tarot deck, but even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t bear to pass that cursed deck onto someone else.
I closed the shop soon after Molly’s funeral. No amount of smudging could remove the gut-wrenching feeling I had every time I stepped foot in it. It’s been vacant since, word spreading about my sister making future tenants weary. I still worry that man is going to come back and give me something even more horrible than the deck, something truly from the devil.
End statement.
There wasn’t too much to research on this case to prove its authenticity. Sasha looked through records of crystal shops in the Cambridge area that closed around that time, and came up with The Ward Sisters: Tarot Readings and Crystals. The shop closed September 1st, 2006, after the death of one of the owners, Molly Ward. The coroners report a drug overdose as the cause of death, though noted the grey skin of the corpse as irregular. Martin contacted Isabella for a follow-up, but she didn’t bother to give a response.
The letter did come with the black box mentioned in the statement, with an eye that had six eyelashes pointing in different directions drawn in white chalk on the top of the lid.
The man she described doesn’t match anyone to our knowledge, no matter how much Tim kept searching, so for now, this statement will be put to rest.
End Recording.