I am a Fortune Teller…
Short Story : I am a Fortune Teller….
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ( Horror Story)
By Prabir Rai Chaudhuri . All Copyright Reserved 2018
In families things are always inherited, many times in addition to material possessions, knowledge and work are also inherited, as is the case with my family. It is said that many of us possess a gift that allows us to see and do things that ordinary people cannot.
They call us witches, fortune tellers, shamans, among many other names, the truth is that just as some are shoemakers and then the business is passed on to their children, my mother is a witch, she reads cards, hands, sees the future, does love works, among other things, it was my grandmother who taught her and then they both taught me.
At first I found it exciting, then I learned that it was a
great responsibility because the truth is that those who have this knowledge can deceive, lie and do a lot of harm to other people.
My grandmother says that this gift is passed down from generation to generation in the family, sometimes to men but more commonly to women. She told me that it all started with an ancestor, an indigenous woman who was the daughter of a shaman.
It was during a time after the arrival of the Spanish to the continent, she says that she fell in love with a gypsy who came on a ship from Spain, they had a relationship but the man had promised to marry her when he returned to his country, however he decided to stay with her and break his promise.
So from this union was born a lineage of witches and fortune tellers, although some thought that more than a gift it was a curse for not having kept their promise, I really don't know how true this story is, but this was what my mother and my grandmother told those who asked about the trade inherited from our house, especially their clients.
The thing is that I grew up seeing this, for me it was something normal, everyone knew that my mother was something like a witch and since I was little I learned to read hands and cards, I discovered that I had the gift, I saw it as a hobby, plus my friends liked it and I feel that in some way this made people respect me or want to hang out with me.
One day we were given a task, we had to do a presentation in groups, for some reason that I no longer remember we left the work for last, so the day before the delivery I agreed with my group that we would stay at my house to do the work and not have any problems.
We were four friends, I remember it took us several hours to finish, but when we did we decided to relax and start talking, until one of them asked me to read their future.
We started with the pendulum to guess how many children we would have, I suppose that many girls at that age tend to do this as a game.
Usually a needle hanging from a thread is used, but I had a pendulum made of black glass that my grandmother had given me.
As always, I asked one of my friends to extend her hand, which should not be too stretched out or completely closed, so you have to be energetically prepared. I asked her to think intensely about her future and concentrate.
Then I put the pendulum on the palm of her hand, you have to make an up and down movement, but without touching the hand, I don't know how to explain it but there is a moment when you feel a kind of vibration, of course for us it was more of a game at that moment, but the funny thing was that whenever we did this to Juana, my best friend, nothing came out of it, we joked about not having children and in the end she said that she wasn't very interested in that either.
Then we moved on to palm reading, which my friends always found more interesting because the pendulum, as I already said, could be better understood with a simple girl's game.
So I started reading each of their hands , when I was doing the reading for my best friend I saw something that made me stop for a moment, I had never seen a life line so short before, in fact before that day I didn't remember her having one like that, she noticed my reaction and asked me what I had seen, so I told her that compared to the other friends who were with us, her life line was much shorter.
She wanted to know what it meant and although I was afraid to know the answer, I told her that I wasn't sure. I tried to sound carefree because the truth is that as our lives progress we take different paths so our destiny changes, nothing is written. Then it occurred to me to tell them that it would be better if we watched a movie, but Juana was not satisfied with the reading and at that moment she was the only person I had told that I already knew how to do the card reading, so she insisted.
to have them read to find out what their hand reading meant, and although at first I didn't want to, I ended up accepting because they all insisted a lot.
So I went for the letters my mom had stored in her closet, I tried not to let her notice but somehow she sensed what I was doing and called me from the living room where I was watching TV, I told her that we were just hanging out because we had already finished our school work, she told me that she wasn't going to forbid me anything but that once she knew something it was almost impossible to change it, I didn't pay much attention to her because I was in a hurry to get back to my friends.
I went back to my room, everyone was excited to ask things about their love lives, for a moment I thought Juana would do that, but when her turn came she decided to ask why their life line was so short.
So I put three cards in front of us and started turning them over one by one, the first was the Tower, I interpreted it as a change, a determining and irreversible event, the second was the Death card and although many people interpret it as something bad, it does not necessarily mean that, it is more of an omen, something inevitable or the end of a stage and the last card was The Hanged Man, this card could be both positive and negative.
I knew it was a sign of martyrdom or sacrifice, but what left me speechless was that all her cards came out upside down, this is usually a bad omen, I tried to talk to her, I thought the reading was very influenced by negative thoughts she had regarding her life line.
Finally my friends started making jokes and asking her to relax. She asked me if everything was going to be okay and even though I had a really bad feeling, I told her yes. I really thought everything was going to be okay. I just asked her to take good care of herself.
After this we watched a movie and went to bed after midnight, so as expected we woke up late the next day.
In order to get to school, we got ready as quickly as we could, went out into the street and had to grab a taxi, because normally there was a bus that would take us there but because of the time we couldn't use it that day.
So we got into the taxi and started asking the driver to go as fast as he could because we couldn't stay out. We had worked so hard on that presentation the night before because it was part of the final grade for one of the classes, so we were in a hurry.
I don't remember exactly how it happened, but in the middle of traffic and the rush while we were crossing a bridge that connected two points over a river, the driver lost control of the vehicle and we fell several meters. I remember feeling very scared while we were falling and then I lost consciousness.
I woke up in the hospital that night to find out that Juana was the only one who had not survived the accident.
The next day I was able to leave in time for the funeral. The entire school attended the wake, many went to the cemetery. I felt devastated. I remember that at one point when we were at the funeral, I felt that she was there. When I looked towards where her parents were, I saw a light in the shape of a silhouette. It was her, but no one else could see her.
That same night I had a dream, but more than that I feel that it was the way my friend said goodbye to me.
In the dream I was in a kind of forest, the trees were very tall, I could hear the sound of a waterfall in the distance, then someone was holding my hand, I couldn't see their face clearly but I heard their voice.
She was my friend, she started talking to me and it was like she was reading my thoughts, I believed that if somehow I had been more accurate with the predictions of her future, maybe I could have avoided the accident, but she told me that there are things that cannot be changed, that I should not
feeling guilty for nothing, then she said goodbye and I never saw her again.
I always wondered if I was the only one who saw it but I never had the chance to talk about it with the friends who had stayed at my house that night because, after the unfortunate event, they stopped talking to me for several months.
They later confessed to me that they also felt somewhat guilty and had begun to fear me. The truth is that our friendship was never the same again. Furthermore, my other classmates found out and no one wanted to be near me anymore.
Copyright © 2018 Prabir Rai Chaudhuri
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