I wrote Arcana when my children were 5 and 7, which is a looooong time ago (my youngest turns 21 TODAY). After subbing it around to agents and getting very little interest, I wrote Vasilisa (which was the book that got me the agent) and decided Arcana was just a learning novel. I had rewritten my first book, Mab’s Gate, so many times, it had become my personal Groundhog’s Day. But by the time Arcana came along, I’d decided it’s easier to write something new than fix something old (which is kind of true).
So, reading the manuscript 16 years later was a revelation, and I’m excited to puzzle out what needs changing and what doesn’t (you can help me with that).
Arcana is intended as Book One of the Keys of the Tarot trilogy. It’s set in an undifferentiated past (maybe mid-1960s), and opens in a small, fictitious town that’s vaguely modeled on Amity, Oregon. It’s my homage to Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, with a bit of Davinci Code thrown in.
The blurb: Three small town teens in mid-century America stumble through a portal in a carnival trailer into bygone chapters of history, only to discover they are reincarnated members of an ancient mystery sect who must decode clues hidden in the tarot if they are to defeat the Faustian designs of the dark stranger chasing them through time.
Packed a lot in that sentence, didn’t I!
Here’s the prologue — or a very short first chapter.
Something Wicked
The wind came first.
It came before the black, large-wheeled trucks and aging Studebakers, the trailers and converted buses, painted with fantastical scenes. The caravan skulked down Main Street in the cloud-swept darkness, fenders hunched like shoulders, headlights splitting clouds of radiator steam. But the wind came first. It spun the barber’s pole, toppled trash cans and bicycles, and set the jeweler’s dog to barking. Its call was like a jackal’s, high and wild, as it leapt from awning to awning, ripped fabric and scattered leaves – and all the while the caravan rolled behind it, patient and slow.
Inside, in the apartments above the diner and the barbershop, the drugstore and the grocery, the lawyer’s offices and a handful more darkened shops, people slept, troubled by dreams. But, as always, there were the few who could not sleep, those who had outgrown the town but had yet to leave it, and these now lingered before parted curtains, robes cinched tight against the chill.
The carnival had not come this way in many years.
The last trailer cleared the storm grate at the edge of town, but the wind and the caravan were only the beginning. Already, thunder clapped in the distant hills. Lightning shocked the leafless, autumnal trees. The wind, now savage, tore barn doors from rusted hinges and sent weathervanes spiraling up into an eerie black-green sky. Rain sheeted the trucks and trailers that had circled in Pearson’s fallow field. It drenched the canvas men who labored in the crisscross glow of headlights, hoisting poles and tightening ropes, pounding stakes and unrolling yard after yard of faded canvas. The Big Top rose; lights flickered on the Ferris Wheel, the midway, the side-show annex, then held a steady glow. One trailer stood apart, small and unremarkable, now lit in stark relief as the sky flashed white, but in the next flash – vanished as if it had never been.
The man left the carnival grounds alone. He carried no umbrella and walked erect, never swerving in his path, through ditches and over fences, past grain elevators and filbert orchards and back lawns where dogs howled, straining at the leash. He cut across the grange yard and then bent northward, out half a mile or more until he came to the old Benedictine monastery. Mounting the stair, he took out a hammer. One, two, three strokes, and then it was done, and the man turned back the way that he had come.
The carnival flyer strained and flapped against its five-penny nail, but no wind could tear it free. The monks slept on. But upstairs, in a small room above the calefactory, a boy heard the hammer blows and opened his eyes.
As luck would have it, I went to a little traveling carnival just last week! The Flynn Creek Circus sets up every year in Avery Park, and we always go to the night show, which is very irreverent and features lots of people doing impossible things like it was no big deal. If you live on the west coast, it could be coming to a town near you!
I’m looking forward to getting back to ACTUAL NOVEL WRITING after a hiatus of (gulp) several years. Hope I remember how. I’d love to hear any thoughts on Arcana’s premise, style, whatever! You can comment or send me a message. And if the prologue meets with your approval, I’ll try sharing Chapter One soon.
Image attribution: Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons