An orderly took me to the Scarlet House, a block-house with red-painted doors. He had almost to carry me because I could scarcely walk. There was no mouth in his fao mouth. His eyes were feral, wild, scarcely human.
"Aha!" says the t in a great good humour; "Your memory is playing tricks on you!"
He himself, such is his magnanimity, received me in a vast, eg hall hung with extravagant tapestries. I retain only the most fused recolles of its exterior but I know the inside perfectly well, now. It is a maze of cells like the inside of a braiook away my old coat that was still bundled around my shoulders and dropped it into an ior. Then he showed me the sacrificial knife, which is made of black obsidian, and said to me: "As of the present moment you inhabit the world no longer sihe least impulse of my will cause you to disappear from it."
But his methods are more subtle than the knife. Dedicated as he is to the dissolution of forms, he intends to erode my sense of being by equippih a multiplicity of beings, so that I found myself with my own profusion of pasts, presents and futures.
I am eroding, I am wearing away. I am being stroked as smooth as stone is by the hands of the sea; the elements that went to make up my uniqueness fall apart as he erases the tapes of my memory and makes his own substitutions. For, if my first capture incorporates within it ruins that do not yet exist and my sed capture resonates with too many echoes of books I might have read, then my third and by far my most moving capture might only recapitulate a Middle-European nightmare, an episode frue or Vienna seen in a movie, perhaps, or told me by a plete stranger during the exposed privacy of a long train journey. For sometimes I ot believe Ive suffered so much.
If only I could remember everything perfectly, just as it happehen loaded with the ambivalent burden of my past, I should be free.
But in this brothel where memorys the prostitute there is no such thing as freedom; all is governed by the fall of the cards. Madame Schreck, of course, is the High Priestess or Female Pope. The t has given her a blue robe to wear over that terrible red dress that reminds us all, every time we see it, of the irresoluble and animal part of ourselves we all hold in on, since we are women. She is the paradigm of sexuality. At her hairy hole ay homage as if it were the mouth of an oracular cave.
When we play the Tarot Game, Madame Schreck sits on a small throhey bring down the ts special book, the book in blak on purple paper that he keeps hanging from a twisted beam in his private apartments; they open it up and spread it out on her open lap, to mimic her sex, which is also a forbidden book.
The Tarot Game is like those games of chess that medieval princes performed on the blad white marble chequered floors of their palaces, using men for pieces. Theyd dress oeam in blad oeam in white; the knights would be mounted on suitably caparisoned chargers who sometimes unloaded a freight of dung as they stepped delicately sideways, to prove the game was real. The bishops would be properly mitred; the pawns, no doubt, dressed as ilitia. The t plays the Game of Tarot with a major ara of fourteen of his retinue. If Madame Schreck adopts the emblems of the Papess to the manner born, the Fool remains himself, of course. They mask themselves and perform random dao sounds not unlike screaming that the t extorts from aronithesiser. He reads the pat