I was twenty-three when I started reading tarot cards professionally. I know how that sounds — trust me, my mother had the same reaction. “Priya,” she said, “you have an MBA. You could work at a bank.” But there’s something about the cards that always made sense to me in a way balance sheets never did. I’d been doing readings out of my flat in Pune for about eight months, mostly college students, a few housewives curious about their marriages, the occasional software engineer asking about promotions. Normal stuff. Harmless stuff.
I should have known something was wrong the week it all started. Looking back, there were signs I just kept explaining away.
It began on a Tuesday evening in October. The monsoon had just ended and the air still felt thick, that specific Pune heaviness that clings to your skin. My client that night was a woman — maybe forty, well-dressed, pearl earrings. She’d booked through Instagram, which was totally normal. She sat across from me at my little table, the one I’d draped with purple cloth to look professional, and she smiled and asked for a full Celtic Cross spread.
I shuffled the deck. And then I turned over the first card.
The Tower. Fine. It means upheaval, disruption. Common enough.
I turned the second. The Tower again. Obviously impossible — I only have one Tower in my deck. I actually laughed a little, nervous. “Weird,” I said, and I picked both cards up to look at them. They were identical. Same wear on the edges, same slight crease in the corner I’d made months ago by accident. Two identical Tower cards in a deck that should have had exactly one.
I felt my heart drop.
The woman’s smile hadn’t moved. Not even slightly.
“Keep going,” she said.
I turned over seven more cards. Every single one was The Tower. Nine cards, nine Towers. I know what you’re thinking — maybe I was just paranoid, maybe I’d somehow bought a misprinted deck. I’d used this deck that morning with another client and everything was fine. But I told myself exactly that. I laughed it off, apologized, said I’d need to use a different deck. She said not to bother and left without paying. I didn’t chase after her. I didn’t want to.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t name it yet.
The next client came three days later. A young man, maybe my age, referral from a friend of a friend. He was quiet, fidgety, kept looking at the door. About twenty minutes into the reading, I turned over the Death card — not unusual, it rarely means literal death — and he went completely still.
“What does it say about me specifically?” he asked.
“It’s more about transformation,” I started explaining, the standard reassurance.
“No.” He leaned forward. “What does it say about when.”
I looked down at the spread again. And I — I still don’t know how to explain this properly. The cards looked different. The imagery had shifted. The figures on them were moving, I mean genuinely moving, like a video playing on paper, and they were all facing away. Every single figure on every single card had their back turned. And in the center of the Death card, where the skeleton on the horse should have been, there was nothing. Just white. Like the card knew it had nothing to show me.
I told him I was feeling unwell and ended the session. He looked almost relieved.
That was the moment I should have stopped. I wish I had listened to that feeling.
I didn’t stop.
The third client contacted me through a number I didn’t recognize — WhatsApp message, no profile photo, just a name: Vikram. He asked for a reading about his future. When I asked him to come in person, he said he preferred I simply place the cards and describe what I saw, that he would wait.
I did it. I don’t know why. I was curious, I mean obviously that was my first mistake.
I laid the ten-card spread on my table alone in my flat, eleven o’clock at night. The rain had started again outside. I turned the cards one by one and began typing my observations into WhatsApp.
After the fourth card, he replied before I’d sent anything.
You’re going to see something in the last card. Don’t say it out loud.
I felt every hair on my arms stand up. I hadn’t typed a single word yet.
I turned the tenth card.
It was blank. Not white like the other one — blank like the card had never been printed on. And in that blankness I saw, I genuinely saw, a reflection. My own face. Looking up at me from the card. But my reflection’s mouth was moving and I wasn’t moving mine.
My phone buzzed.
She’s been trying to warn you. The woman with the pearl earrings. She wasn’t a client.
To this day, I still don’t know what that means. I threw my phone across the room, grabbed my keys, and drove to my parents’ house in the middle of the night. I told my mother I was stressed about work.
I haven’t done a reading since. I burned the deck in the building’s rubbish area the next morning. I told myself the whole thing had a rational explanation — carbon monoxide, stress, I don’t know.
But last week I found a tarot card in my old jacket pocket. I don’t remember putting it there.
It was The Tower.
Both sides were blank.
