Shadows Out of Time

It was a hunch that made me kill the light. As I inhaled the aromatic scent, I touched the tea with trembling fingers, psychometrizing the treasure trove of slightly moist leaves. My eyes began to apprehend things in the dark. I saw a Clipper pull into a wild jungle port. Amber-brown Asiatic natives came to the crude dock bearing chest after chest of freshly harvested tea leaves. They made strange signs as they traded the chests for gold and silver. Other, more exotic objects were traded, too. I perceived a faceless ebony idol, and sensed part of its name — hotep. It meant nothing to me.

Then the Blue Moon cast off. I could see her clip off the miles back to America. I saw her tear into the teeth of gales and storms, as indomitable as a gleaming sword. My ears were assaulted by the tortured creaking of her stout timbers, the cracking of her stressed sails. High winds howled about my face.

The dirt floor beneath my feet turned hard and unstable, like a tossing ship’s deck. I felt transported, as if back to that hard era where seamen spent months of their lives husbanding strange cargoes and argosies across vast, unforgiving oceans. Hastily, I slammed down the lid to choke off those intoxicating fumes.

Whatever made Kingsport tea what it was, it could rob a man of all connection to earthly reality. And for that reason, I knew I had to find out where it came from. I had to go to the source. For with a reliable supply of Kingsport tea, I would become the most powerful psychic of modern times. No more thirty-dollar a half-hour readings for me, with two-thirds of the fee going to the house.

Exhaling in long gusts to clear the tang of tea from my lungs, I crept back to the first floor, restored all locks, and stole away— to sleep and dream of a future certain to be mine. A future built upon a mountain of magical tea.

Over the next few months, I got to know Miss Theresa well. I had become her good right hand. In time, she trusted me enough that I received the keys to the cellar tea store.

Cautiously, I brought up the subject of Kingsport tea.

“There is no tea like it on earth,” she confided one evening, warming to the subject. “The leaves are the highest grade. They are not the lesser leaves like Pekoe cut or Pekoe Souchong. There are no fannings in my tea. We get our store from the same plantation that my great-great-great grandfather Esau Terrill founded in ’53. It’s still there, unchanged and undisturbed by the dreary modern world. Every November the tea is harvested and set upon withering racks. And each December, a new store is laid in for the year to come. Tradition is so important here, you know.”

She drifted off into a reverie. In that unguarded moment, I shifted my consciousness over to my left temporal lobe, and listened psychically. Faintly, as if whispered into my brain by a soft-voiced ghost, I got one word: Siam.

And I knew she spoke the truth about where to find the timeless tea. Strange that I heard Siam, and not Thailand. I threw my qualms away. This was a breakthrough.

Miss Theresa shook off her memories. “I should do your chart, Mr. Shaner. I am an accomplished astrologer, as well as a card reader of the old school. I happen to have a Grand Trine in Fire. Did you know that?”

That made her a Sag Moon and Aries Rising, or the reverse, on top of that Leo Sun. Anyone with that much fire in her chart was someone you didn’t cross — or crossed very, very carefully, if you must.

“I would be honored,” I said gallantly.

She smiled toothily. “Give me your exact birth data.”

I hesitated. This was probably the most dangerous moment since I had come to Theresa Terrill’s Tea Room. But there was no time to think. I broke a rule and gave the old lioness my true birth data. Couldn’t chance her intuiting a lie, psychically or astrologically. If I so much as shaved my birth hour to a.m. instead of p.m., that would change the Rising Sign and all of the houses. She’d know when she drew up the chart that I was no Gemini rising, even if I hadn’t already spilled those beans at our first meeting. I only hoped she didn’t detect my intentions via my planetary picture. For there is an old astrological saying: “Scorpio is the thief.”

I jumped back to the subject. “How did trade with Siam start?”

Theresa folded the paper slip on which she had written my birth particulars. “During the reign of King Mongkut, the most honorable and long-lived Siamese ruler in history. Mongkut had been a Buddhist monk for nearly 30 years before he was elevated to the Siamese throne. Siam in those days was the only Asian power to resist colonial rule.” Touching my wrist, she lowered her voice. “It was said he dabbled in forbidden arts and practices. The tea trade made him rich, and world-famous, for Siam was not, and is not today, a tea-producing nation. But the tea that did grow in the inaccessible regions of the Khorat Plateau was potent in ways that transcended all other teas.”

“Never heard of Mongkut…”