The Coven13 Crypt

When Marita got home from work on Friday evening the box she ordered in the estate auction had been delivered and was there on her porch, the corrugated cardboard sagged at the corners, and the seams were patched with layers of mismatched tape. A musty smell lingered around the package and it wasn’t even opened yet.

She wasn’t surprised. Estate liquidators rarely bothered with presentation. They sold by the pallet, by the trunkload, by the weight. As-is, no promises. That was the gamble.

Marita had taken plenty of gambles before. She rented a booth at an antique mall on the edge of town, filling it with whatever odds and ends she managed to dig up like old postcards, costume jewelry, and antique glassware. Some months she barely broke even, while others one overlooked treasure paid her rent three times over. She was in it for the joy it brought her, not the money anyway.

She sliced the tape open with her kitchen scissors and pushed aside wads of yellowed newspaper. Out came a decorated brooch missing half its glass stones, a cigarette case with hinges rusted solid, a glass perfume bottle stained amber from whatever it once held. Not worthless, people often buy the things you’d least expect, but she didn’t see anything that quickened her pulse.

She kept sorting, her fingers quick and practiced. This pile sellable at the antique booth. That pile destined for the trash. Maybe if lucky, she would find something for her own collection.

That was when she found it.

The compact lay at the bottom, heavier than the rest of the baubles. Its silver casing was tarnished black in spots, but the design was fine: a ring of laurel leaves etched around the lid, delicate and old-fashioned. It clicked open with more force than she expected, like it hadn’t been unlatched in decades.

The mirror inside was clean. Clear. But when she looked in the mirror she was aghast, the face staring back at her wasn’t hers.

Marita blinked. Leaned closer. Was it a photograph? No it was a reflection, moving when she moved and mimicking her every tilt and blink. The mirror showed an older woman, sharp-cheeked and composed, her hair pinned in a style Marita had only ever seen in old black-and-white photographs.

She snapped the compact shut, heart beating hard against her ribs. “Okay,” she muttered, almost laughing. “That’s a trick of the glass. Distortion, I’m just tired. The silvering must have warped.”

She opened it again.

The same woman looked back at her. Still pale. Still elegant. Still not Marita.

For a long moment, she sat frozen at the table, the compact balanced in her palm, as though it weighed far more than it should. The house was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator.

Finally, she set it aside and rubbed her temples. It was late, she was tired, she was letting shadows play games with her mind. She closed the mirror and thought she’d check again tomorrow, maybe in sunlight.

Marita didn’t sleep well that night. She lay in bed with the compact on her nightstand, the closed lid pointed toward her like an accusing eye. Every time she drifted close to sleep, she imagined it clicking open on its own. By dawn she gave up, rolled out of bed, and told herself she’d feel less ridiculous in daylight.

Saturday mornings in the house were always noisy. Her roommates lingered over coffee and cereal, music played from someone’s phone, and laundry ran in the basement. Normal life, loud and ordinary. It seemed like the perfect chance to prove to herself that the mirror was just a trick of exhaustion.

“Hey,” she said, sliding into the kitchen with the compact in hand. “You guys want to see something weird?”

Maya, still in pajamas, smirked over her coffee mug. “Depends what kind of weird.”

“Not gross-weird,” Marita said. “Just… strange.”

She opened the compact and handed it across the table. “Look. Tell me who you see.”

Maya raised an eyebrow but leaned over the glass. The smirk slid off her face. “That’s… not me.” She pushed it back like it might bite. “Who the hell is that woman?”

“Hold on, let me try.” Derek reached for it. He squinted, frowned, then chuckled nervously. “Yeah, okay, that’s creepy. She looks like somebody’s grandma. Doesn’t even blink right.”

Marita felt a tightness in her chest. “So you see her too?”

“Yeah,” Maya said, shoving her chair back from the table. “And I don’t want to see her again. Whatever that thing is, it’s cursed or haunted or something. You should get rid of that, it scares me.”

Derek tried to laugh it off, but he set the compact down a little too quickly, as though it had grown hot in his hands.

Marita closed the lid, her palms slick with sweat. The confirmation didn’t calm her. It made everything worse.

She told herself she’d tuck the compact away, maybe even sell it with the next batch of junk at the booth, but instead she carried it back to her room and left it on the dresser. Every time she passed, she caught herself glancing toward it, half-daring it to move.

By evening, she couldn’t resist. She opened the lid and stared.

The woman was waiting.

At first, the reflection copied her as always, mimicking every blink and every tilt of the head. But after a few breaths, Marita noticed something wrong. Her own chest was rising and falling. The woman’s wasn’t.

Then the lips twitched. Once. Twice. Slowly shaping soundless words.

Marita’s pulse hammered. She leaned in close. The mouth moved again, more deliberate this time. She thought she could almost hear it, not through her ears, but deep inside her head.

Get out.

Marita jerked back, the compact trembling in her hand. Her breath came in shallow bursts. She stared at the woman’s lips, sure she had imagined it, yet when she leaned closer again, the mouth was still moving, shaping the same phrase with agonizing clarity.

Get out.

This time the woman’s expression shifted. Her eyes flicked side to side, as though watching something approach from beyond the glass. The elegance slipped from her face, replaced with raw fear. Her lips parted again, but whatever words followed never formed.

Instead, her image began to dissolve. The pale skin washed to gray, her features blurring into smoke. For the first time since Marita had opened the compact, the stranger was gone.

In her place, something new began to surface.

Her own reflection.

Marita’s heart lurched. She leaned closer, and the woman in the mirror leaned too, her own face at last. Just then a sudden weakness flooded her body, spreading from her chest into her arms and legs. Her grip faltered.

The compact slipped from her fingers and snapped shut against the floor.

Marita staggered backward, her legs weak beneath her. A heavy dizziness pressed against her skull, as though her blood had thinned all at once. She reached for the dresser, missed, and half-collapsed onto the bed.

Her breaths came shallow and uneven. Each one weaker than the last. She tried to call out for Maya or Derek, but her throat refused to shape the words. Her eyes darted once toward the compact on the rug. Its lid had shut tight with that final snap, polished silver catching the dim light from her lamp.

She thought just for a heartbeat, that she saw her own reflection glimmering in the surface, even through the closed case. Her lips parted to whisper, to beg, but no sound escaped.

Her chest rose once. Fell. And did not rise again.

The room grew still. The compact waited, silent, its secret sealed once more.

When it was opened again, Marita would be there, polished and patient staring back perhaps ready to warn the next curious soul.

The garage sale was the sort of Saturday sprawl that smelled like cut grass and damp cardboard. Folding tables sagged with old paperbacks, mismatched mugs, and boxes of tangled cords.

Lena drifted past it all with the idle patience of someone who had learned to wait for the thing that called to her. She worked quiet nights as a death doula, sitting vigil, making tea, holding hands when families ran out of words. On her days off she haunted thrift stores and yard sales. She liked objects that had soaked up lives. Books with notes in the margins. Recipe cards with grease on the corners. Tarot decks most of all. Tools people had trusted.

Half hidden near the edge of a table was a blue box the size of a tarot deck. The blue was softened by decades. The white type was almost a memory. Rider Tarot Deck. Her breath caught. She turned the box in her hands. The lid slid with that soft, papery whisper she loved. No copyright stamp on the card faces. Early 1970s. Blue Box Rider. The one she had been hoping might find her someday.

“How much for this?” she asked.

The woman running the sale looked up from a pile of sweaters with a braid and tired eyes. “Two dollars,” she said.

Lena pressed the bills into the coffee tin before the woman could change her mind. She opened the flap of her canvas messenger bag, the one she always carried on mornings like this, and slid the box inside being careful not to bend it. She pulled the flap closed and patted it flat, as though sealing a promise. Some finds were not accidents. Some were meant to be.

At home she cleared a space on the kitchen table and set the box down like a small ceremony. The cardboard was soft at the corners. There was a faint smell she knew by heart. Incense. Wax. A little smoke that had lived in someone’s curtains. She slid the lid, poured the cards into her hands, and felt the weight of them. The colors were gentle. Yellows that did not shout. Blues like water.

She counted out of habit, touching each card with her finger. One to seventy-eight, the number she had spoken a hundred times for other decks. She stopped at seventy-four. Her chest tightened. She spread them again, slower this time, sorting the majors from the minors. Four were missing: The Hanged Man. The Moon. The Eight of Swords. Judgment.

Her excitement thinned to a hollow ache. A deck with holes in it was a relic, not a tool. She gathered the cards, slid them back into the blue box, and stood in the kitchen listening to the faint city sounds outside. She told herself it was still a good find. She told herself she might find another incomplete someday and make a whole.

That night she put the box in her jewelry case and turned the key. It felt a little silly locking them up, but the gesture soothed something practical in her. She washed her cup. She checked her phone. She went to bed with a paperback and read until the lines blurred.

When she turned off the lamp, the room kept a soft watchful quiet. She was used to that. The quiet that follows a long breath. The quiet between last words and what comes after.

She slept, and the house held its breath around her.

Morning light found the edges of the nightstand. Lena reached for the lamp and froze. A card lay beside the base, face up, the figure blindfolded and bound between eight blades. Eight of Swords. Her heart knocked once. She sat up too fast. She knew the deck was locked. She knew where the key was on a small hook by the door. She pressed her thumb to the card and it was real. Old stock. The same soft finish as the others.

She let out a breath. People miscount all the time. She must have. She carried the card and opened the jewelry case on her dresser. The blue box was where she had left it. She set the Eight of Swords on top and closed the lid. The box shut with a faint snap.

The next evening she curled up with her book. Halfway through a chapter something slipped free and fell into her lap with a soft click. She looked down. The Moon. Pale and watchful. Dogs howling at a thin path that led into water. She felt the quiet shift. Not a danger, exactly. More like someone standing in a doorway, waiting to be noticed.

“Okay,” she said out loud, because sometimes that helped. “I see you.”

She set The Moon with the Eight of Swords and tried not to think about the locked box and the key and how her hands had not touched either since last night.

The third evening she opened her silverware drawer to set the table and stopped. The Hanged Man lay across the forks. Not crooked. Not fallen. Placed. The figure dangled upside down, a calm face staring at the world from a patient pause.

Her skin prickled from wrist to shoulder. She carried the card by the edges and laid it with the others. The stack felt like a heartbeat.

Three cards had come home on their own. One was still absent. Judgment. Trumpets. Wings. The moment a body learns it is more than what it has been.

She put the full seventy-seven into the blue box and locked it again. The key went back on the hook. She washed her hands. She turned on the radio and let a soft station fill the room because silence was starting to press on her like a hand.

She woke before dawn to a shape on the kitchen table that had not been there when she went to bed. A Celtic Cross, laid out with deliberate care. Nine cards instead of ten. The first card at the center was The Hanged Man. Crossing it was the Eight of Swords. The Moon sat at the top, future watching. But at the base, the position meant for the root, there was only an empty space. The gap seemed louder than the cards themselves, a silence that demanded to be read.

Later that day Lena drove back to the quiet street and parked outside the house. The tables were gone. Only the house remained, ordinary as any other. She knocked on the door, her heart thudding harder than it should have.

The same woman with the braid answered, surprised to see her again.

“Hi,” Lena said. “I bought a tarot deck here on Saturday. The blue one.”

The woman gave a quick, measuring look, then nodded. “I remember.”

“I wanted to ask about it. Whose was it?”

“My mother’s,” she said. “She was into that stuff. She read every Sunday morning at the table. I would come over for coffee and she would lay them out”. The woman smiled and swallowed and the smile turned into something softer. “She died in December. A drunk driver on Jefferson. Broad daylight. Everyone said it was senseless. I think that word is too tidy for what it was.”

“I am sorry,” Lena said. She meant it. “What was her name?”

“Ruth.” The woman touched the edge of the doorframe as if steadying it. “Ruth Talley. My name is Mara.”

“Thank you,” Lena said. She did not push for more. She went home with the blue box in her messenger bag and Ruth’s name filling the car.

That night, she lit a candle and placed the deck on the table. She drew out her pendulum, a small brass weight on a silver chain. Holding it over the cards, she steadied her hand.

“Is someone here?” she asked. The pendulum swung hard in a sure arc. Yes.

“Are you the one who laid out the spread?” Yes.

“Are you Ruth Talley?” The pendulum circled strongly. Yes.

Her throat tightened. “Do you… do you know that you’ve passed on?”

The chain faltered, wavered, then gave a weak, trembling yes.

The air in the room grew heavy. The candle flame stretched tall and thin. Lena laid the cards back into the spread. The Hanged Man at the center. Eight of Swords crossing. The Moon in the future.

“You are waiting for Judgment,” Lena whispered.

The pendulum swung, certain this time. Yes.

“Is it at the place where you died?”

Yes.

“Okay,” Lena said. “I will go. I will find it for you.”

She typed Ruth Talley Jefferson crash into the search bar. The obituary was there, along with a short news article. The article gave the intersection. The photo showed a cracked curb, a leaning road sign, and a strip of grass with white clover blooming like a quiet apology.

The next morning Lena drove to Jefferson Avenue. It was ordinary in daylight. A barber shop with a striped pole. A bakery with smudged glass and a chalk sign. Summer heat that lifted the smell of tar. 

Lena parked half a block away and walked, the blue box in her bag. She searched the shoulder and the grass. The clover nodded. Ants moved a crumb as if it were a continent. And there, tucked in a crease where curb met dirt, was a sliver of old card stock.

She brushed away grit. The edge showed blue ink. The surface showed a trumpet raised to the sky. Judgment. Faded, weathered, but whole.

“Thank you,” she whispered, though she did not know who she was speaking to.

She went home, lit the candle, and laid the cards back into the cross formation. Her voice was low, steady, reading them aloud as if telling a story back to its author. The Hanged Man. The Eight of Swords. The Moon. At the base, Judgment, restored to its place.

“You can rest now,” Lena said. “The spread is complete.”

The overhead light strained and dimmed. The candle grew tall and still, then went out in a flash.

The house shifted. The air softened. The silence was no longer heavy but gentle, like a door closing.

Lena gathered the cards. For the first time, the deck felt quiet. At peace.

The next morning her table was bare. No spread. No cards out of place. Just sunlight warming the wood, and a quiet she had not known she was missing.

Later that week she told herself the story again in her head, the way people do when they want to keep it close. Not just a story about her, but about Ruth Talley, whose missing cards had finally been found.