Excerpt: The Dark King Swallows the World by Robert G Penner

Excerpted with permission from Radiant Press

She woke as the train descended wind-swept hills into a forest of tall evergreens. The view seemed very rugged and un-English to her. Maybe German. Or Swiss. But even more surprising than the alpine landscape was the small man sitting across from her playing solitaire on the fold-out table beneath the window. He had on an old-fashioned, well-worn, but very neat, dark suit. His head was suspended in a halo of grey hair, heavy caterpillar eyebrows bunched together in concentration. A moustache drooped over his straggly goatee. His hands hovered over the cards. The fine hairs on the back of his fingers and hands grew thicker and blacker as they crept up his wrists and vanished into the mellow white of his shirt. Nora watched through half-lidded eyes as the little hands started to dart about and the cards snapped and cracked in a blur of intricate movement.

She watched in a reverie for quite some time. The sun flashed in and out of the tall trees along the track. The creak and moan of the carriage sounded like an old sailing ship, like they were cutting across the waves on a breezy day. Occasionally, the old man looked up at her slyly from beneath his beetled brow as his fingers danced about. When their eyes finally met, Nora smiled at him, and he gave her a small smile in return.

“Good sleep, yes?” he asked, and she could hear the burr of an accent, maybe something Teutonic, something that matched the scenery.

“It was lovely,” said Nora and stretched. She dug around in her bag and found the can of peppermints her grandmother had packed for her. She popped one in her mouth.

“Would you like one?” she proffered the can to the old man.

“Thank you,” he said, plucked one out, and began sucking on it noisily as he returned to his cards.  

“What funny cards!” Nora said. “I thought you were playing patience, but the cards don’t seem quite right.”

“It is a piquet deck,” the old man said. “It has fewer cards than a bridge deck.”

He looked up at her, and this time his smile was so big that, for a second, his bright eyes vanished entirely.

“It is better for telling the future.” he said. “Fewer mistakes.”

“Can you read the future?” Nora asked.

“No,” said the old man. “But sometimes I can read the cards, and the cards can read the future.”

Nora giggled. “Can you read my cards?”

“Well,” he said, “I have been winning. And that always makes one a little more hopeful about such chancy endeavours as divination.”

He shuffled the cards into a tidy stack and had Nora cut them and shuffle them herself. Then he shuffled them again and laid out four, face up, in a cross: the jack of hearts, the jack of spades, the queen of diamonds, and a nine of hearts. He made Nora cut the deck again and lay the top card out in the middle of the cross. It was the king of spades. He frowned.

“I think that card is for me,” he said. “It usually is. Let us try again.”

They repeated the process, and while different cards appeared in the cross, the middle was once again occupied by the king of spades. And it happened in the same way the next time. And the next. Then again. And again.

“It’s all a muddle today,” he muttered as they stared at the card. “It has been since this morning.”

“But it doesn’t seem a muddle,” said Nora. “It seems quite the opposite. What does it mean?”  

“It means we should play a different game,” the old man said.

“Oh please,” Nora said. “What does it mean? Is that my mother’s new beau? Is he another black-hearted beast?”

“Almost certainly if such has been her habit, but you don’t need cards to learn something like that,” said the old man, and then he changed the subject. “I’ll teach you piquet. It’s a very old game. Very old indeed. Older than this silly cartomancy.  Rabelais played it, you know? Piquet. Think of that! Rabelais!”

“Who’s Rabelais?” asked Nora.

“He was an ass,” said the old man. “He was a marvellous ass, a marvellous dreaming ass.”  

He began to shuffle the cards.