“Come back,” said the voice.

“Come back,” said the voice on the phone. It was Wicca. Brida was annoyed with her for interrupting such a remarkable experience merely to bore her with more talk about caretakers and plumbers.

“Just a moment,” she replied. She was struggling to find that door, but everything had vanished.

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41

“I know what happened,” Wicca told her. Brida was stunned, in a state of shock. She couldn’t understand what was going on.

“I know what happened,” Wicca said again, in response to Brida’s silence. “I won’t say anything more about the plumber. He was here last week and fixed everything.”

Before hanging up, she said she would expect Brida at the agreed-upon time.

Brida put down the phone without saying good-bye. She sat for a long time staring at the kitchen wall before subsiding into convulsive, soothing sobs.

It was a trick,”Wicca told a frightened Brida when they sat down again in the Italian armchairs.

“I know how you must be feeling,” she went on. “Sometimes we set off down a path simply because we don’t believe in it. It’s easy enough. All we have to do then is prove that it isn’t the right path for us. However, when things start to happen, and the path does reveal itself to us, we become afraid of carrying on.”

Wicca said that she didn’t understand why so many people chose to spend their whole life destroying paths they didn’t even want to follow, instead of following the one path that would lead them somewhere.

“I can’t believe it was a trick,” protested Brida. She had lost her

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air of arrogance and defiance. Her respect for Wicca had grown considerably.

“No, no, the vision wasn’t a trick. The trick I’m referring to is the phone. For millions of years, we only ever spoke to someone we could see, then, in less than a century, ‘seeing’ and ‘speaking’ were suddenly separated. We think it’s quite normal now and don’t realize the huge impact it has on our reflexes. Our body still hasn’t got used to it.

“The practical result is that, when we speak on the phone, we often enter a state very similar to certain magical trances. Our mind tunes into another frequency and becomes more receptive to the invisible world. I know some witches who always keep a pen and paper by the phone, and while they’re talking to someone, they sit doodling apparently nonsensical things. When they hang up, though, they find that their ‘doodles’ are often symbols from the Tradition of the Moon.”

“But why did the tarot reveal itself to me?”

“That’s the great problem with anyone wanting to study magic,” replied Wicca. “When we set out on the path, we always have a fairly clear idea of what we hope to find. Women are generally seeking their Soul Mate, and men are looking for Power.

Neither party is really interested in learning. They simply want to reach the thing they have set as their goal.

“But the path of magic—like the path of life—is and always will be the path of Mystery. Learning something means coming into contact with a world of which you know nothing. In order to learn, you must be humble.”

“Like plunging into the Dark Night,” said Brida.

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“Don’t interrupt.”There was a note of barely contained irritation in Wicca’s voice, but Brida realized that it wasn’t because of what she’d said. “Maybe she’s angry with the Magus,” she thought.

“Perhaps she was once in love with him. They are more or less the same age.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s all right.” Wicca seemed equally surprised by her own reaction.

“You were telling me about the tarot.”

“When you were spreading the cards, you always had a pre-conceived idea of what would happen. You never let the cards tell their own story; you were trying to make them confirm what you imagined you knew.

“I realized this when we started talking on the phone. I realized, too, that it was a sign and that the phone was my ally. So I launched into a very boring conversation and asked you to look at the cards. You went into the trance provoked by the phone, and the cards led you into their magical world.”

Wicca suggested that the next time Brida was with someone who was talking on the phone, she should take a good look at their eyes. She would be surprised by what she saw.

“I want to ask something else,” said Brida over tea in Wicca’s surprisingly modern and practical kitchen.

“I want to know why you didn’t let me abandon the path.”

“Because,” thought Wicca, “I want to find out what the Magus saw in you, apart, I mean, from your Gift.” What she said was:

“Because you have a Gift.”

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“How do you know?”

“Easy. By your ears.”

“By my ears! How disappointing!” Brida thought to herself.

“And there was me thinking she could see my aura.”

“Everyone has a Gift, but some are born with a more highly developed Gift than others—me, for example—who have to struggle really hard to develop their Gift. People who were born with a Gift have very small, attached earlobes.”

Instinctively, Brida touched her earlobes. It was true.

“Do you have a car?”

No, Brida said, she didn’t.

“Then prepare to spend a fortune on taxi fares,” said Wicca, getting up. “It’s time to take our next step.”

“Things are suddenly moving very fast,” thought Brida as she got to her feet. Life was beginning to resemble the clouds she had seen in her trance.

By around midafternoon they had reached some mountains about fifteen miles south of Dublin. “We could have made the same trip by bus,” Brida grumbled to herself while she paid the taxi. Wicca had brought with her a bag and some clothes.