The Seer’s Lament

In the scorched autumn of 1987, I drove west with my four-year-old son, Milo, in the passenger seat of a rusted Chevette. We left behind the cornfields of Indiana and the suffocating weight of the Kingdom Hall, where every question was met with a scripture and every doubt was a sin. I was twenty-one, divorced, and desperate for a god who didn’t demand I swallow my curiosity. My father, Arlen, had been in Los Angeles since 1960, and he promised me a fresh start. I found him living in a narrow bungalow in the hills above Silver Lake, its walls plastered with astrological charts, tarot cards, and photographs of him shaking hands with B-list celebrities. He called it his ‘metaphysical salon,’ but from the moment I stepped through the door, I felt a wrongness—a smell of burnt sage and something else, something like old pennies.

Arlen was a charmer, a man who claimed the stars whispered to him. He had a following: actors, screenwriters, musicians, all seeking a glimpse of their futures at his nightly readings on Venice Beach. They called him the Prophet of the Pacific, but he was more showman than sage. He wore a flowing linen shirt, and his eyes had a feverish gleam as he spoke of cosmic alignments and past lives. He wanted me to join his ‘circle,’ to become a ‘channel’ for his visions. I told him I was just there to work at a diner and raise Milo, but he wouldn’t let it go. ‘You have the gift, Lila,’ he’d say, his voice low and urgent. ‘I see it in your chart. You’re a doorway.’

One evening, he insisted on a private reading. We drove to Venice Beach at six, the sun bleeding into the ocean as we set up a small table and candles on the sand. He had a worn deck of tarot cards, and he shuffled them with a theatrical flair. ‘I’ll read your past, present, and future,’ he said, his smile not quite reaching his eyes. He laid out the first card: the Tower. He frowned. Then the Moon, reversed. His hands trembled as he drew more—Death, the Devil, the Hanged Man. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and he looked up at me with a fear I’d never seen in him before. ‘This is wrong,’ he whispered. ‘You’re not who I thought you were.’ I asked him what he saw, but he refused to say. He scooped up the cards, blew out the candles, and walked back to the car without another word. That night, he locked himself in his study, and I heard him muttering through the door, ‘She’s a void. A mouth that swallows light.’

For weeks, Arlen avoided me. He’d flinch when I entered a room, and he’d told his followers that I was ‘unstable.’ But his fear only made me curious. I started asking questions, to his clients, to his friends. A retired soap opera star told me, in a hushed voice, that Arlen had once predicted a great disaster for a producer—then the man died in a car crash three days later. Another client said she saw her future in his charts, but it was all shadows and blood. ‘He’s not a prophet,’ she said. ‘He’s a messenger for something else.’ I began to notice the changes in Milo. He’d wake up screaming, pointing at the corner of his room and crying, ‘The tall one with the hollow face.’ I thought it was nightmares, but then I saw it myself—a shimmer in the air, like heat off the pavement, but with a shape. It was tall, impossibly thin, with eyes like two black holes. Arlen saw it too. I caught him in the hallway one night, his eyes wide, his lips moving in a desperate prayer to a god he claimed not to believe in. ‘It followed you,’ he gasped. ‘It’s been here since you arrived.’

I confronted him in his study, piles of dusty tomes and star maps scattered on the floor. ‘You made me come here,’ I said. ‘You wanted me to join your circus. What did you see in my chart?’ He broke down then, sobbing like a child. ‘I saw a gateway,’ he said. ‘A place in you that’s open to the other side. I thought it would bring me power, bring me fame. But it’s not a gift, Lila. It’s a curse. It drains the life around you. My clients, they’ve been getting sick, having accidents. You’re a vacuum.’ He pulled out a yellowed photograph of me as a baby, taken by my mother before she died. In the corner of the photo, there was a dark shape, a twisted silhouette that looked like the thing I’d seen in my bedroom. ‘It was with you from the start,’ Arlen said. ‘It’s been feeding on you, on everyone close to you. Your ex-husband, your parents—it drove them away.’

I felt a coldness spread through my chest. I remembered the way my mother had seemed to wither when I was born, how my father had become obsessed with the occult after her death, how my husband had left with no explanation, saying he felt ‘drained’ around me. It wasn’t me. It was this thing. I looked at Arlen, and I saw him tremble. ‘How do I stop it?’ I asked. He shook his head. ‘You can’t. It’s part of you. It’s as much a part of you as your soul.’ He gave me a leather-bound journal, filled with his rambling notes. In the margins, he’d scribbled, ‘The only way to sever the link is to feed it so much light that it chokes.’ But his notes were nonsense—references to rituals involving blood and burning candles.

That night, I took Milo and drove to a twenty-four-hour diner in the Valley. I sat in a booth, the fluorescent lights buzzing, and I wrote down everything that had happened. I felt a presence behind me, that coldness on my neck. I turned, and the flickering light shaped itself into the tall figure. It stood by the door, its head tilting, as if it were watching me with amusement. I screamed, and the waitress looked at me like I was crazy. The figure vanished, but I knew it was still there, lurking in the edges of my vision. I couldn’t escape it. It was with me wherever I went.

I decided to fight back. I remembered the glass of the television, the way it seemed to distort. I thought about the concept of light. I bought a small, handheld mirror and a crucifix—not because I believed, but because they felt like talismans of hope. That night, in my motel room, I set the mirror on the desk and placed the crucifix on top. I lit a candle and brought Milo into the room. He was asleep, his small face peaceful. I sat across from the mirror, staring into my own reflection. The image wavered. Behind my reflection, I saw the figure—it was smiling, a wide, wet grin that split its hollow face. ‘You see me now,’ it seemed to say. I didn’t speak. I focused on the candle, on the flame, imagining it growing, filling the mirror with light. The figure recoiled, hissing. I kept my focus, even as the temperature dropped and the walls seemed to close in. I repeated a phrase in my mind: ‘You are not welcome here.’ The flame flickered, but I held my ground.

After what felt like hours, the figure dissolved, and the mirror showed only my face, pale and tired. I fell back in my chair, gasping. I didn’t know if I’d banished it or merely delayed it. But for the first time since I’d arrived, I felt a sliver of peace. I looked at Milo, and he was sleeping soundly, no sign of nightmares. I took the journal Arlen gave me and tore out a blank page. I wrote, ‘The emptiness in me might be a doorway, but I am the one who decides what comes through.’ I have not defeated the thing that follows me—I know that now. But I have learned that it feeds on fear, and I refuse to give it that. I packed our bags and left Los Angeles before dawn, heading north to a town where no one knew my father, where no one expected me to be a prophet. And when the cold breath brushes the back of my neck, I close my eyes and think of the candle flame, and I remember that even the darkest void can be held at bay by a single point of light.