Madame Celestine's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Madame Celestine had read tea leaves for twenty years, and she knew the cup in front of her was lying. The leaves settled into the shape of a fishhook, then slid sideways against the porcelain, as if a hand under the table had jarred it. Nothing had. She set the cup down on the porch rail and watched dusk press against the cypress trees. For six evenings running, something had stirred at the edge of her porch just as she poured, and the leaves refused to hold their pattern. She wanted a name. Three weeks ago the first message had come through her cup in three words: Roots will rot. Then seven readings in a row, seven different clients, seven different tins of leaves, and the same voice speaking through her mouth. An older woman had grabbed her wrist mid-reading and asked whose voice that was. Celestine could not say. She meant to find out before an eighth client sat down across from her. Her crow watched from the porch post. She had kept the bird three years for its temper and its ears. It cocked its head toward the water and clicked its beak twice. Something was down there again, in the reeds past the steps. She took her lantern and went. The crow flew ahead and landed on a leaning headstone at the edge of the old graveyard behind her house. Moss covered the names. Roots had cracked the stones and lifted them like teeth. At the center stood a family tomb she had passed a thousand times without reading. Tonight the crow perched on its roof and would not move. She brought the lantern close. The carved name on the lintel was worn to ghosts, but a fresh scrape ran along the door where something had clawed at the seam. Wet prints led back toward her porch. Not animal. Not quite. She pressed her palm to the stone and felt it hum, the same hum she felt in her teeth during the bad readings. She walked the long way around the bayou to the general store porch, where Ezekiel Thibodeaux sat in his rocker under the tin roof as he had for forty years. She told him about the tomb. He stopped rocking. He said Mama Laveau was the only one left who remembered which family had been buried behind Celestine's land, and why the shrine there had been sealed. He said go tonight. He said do not pour any more tea until you do. Celestine walked home in the dark with a name to chase and a door to knock on. On her porch, the abandoned cup had cracked clean down the middle. The leaves inside had arranged themselves into two letters she could read plainly. An M. An L. The stirring at the edge of her porch was over. Something worse had started: it knew she was looking now.