Ashley Bell. Dean Koontz

       34

       The I of the Needle

      ASTRAGALOMANCY WAS A METHOD OF DIVINING the future or learning hidden knowledge by rolling dice. A ceromancer dropped melted wax into cold water and interpreted the figures thus produced. Halomancy required the reading of the shapes made by casting a handful of salt on a flat surface. A necromancer sought answers by communicating with the dead.

      When Calida pulled the drawstring on the small flannel bag and spilled the familiar lettered tiles onto the dinette table, she said, “My mother devised and perfected the occult art of Scrabblemancy.”

      Bibi almost laughed, but then she remembered the brutal murder and dismemberment that could be researched online. She swallowed the laugh and washed it down with a sip of wine to conceal how close she had come to giving offense. Even in such vain and silly pursuits as divination, you could unwittingly encounter a sociopath and become the object of her wrath. In fact, the more fruitless and outré the subject of your interest, the more likely it might be that those without a moral compass and with a taste for violence, empty and wandering in search of convictions, might cross your path. Besides, she didn’t want to hurt Calida’s feelings.

      “We are told that in the beginning was the word,” Calida said, “and that the world—the entire universe—was spoken into existence. My mother speculated that the best material with which a diviner could work would be words, not human entrails or lines in your palm or a handful of salt cast on a table, but words. And if words existed before matter of any kind, before suns and worlds and seas and human beings and fortune-tellers … well, then an alphabet must have existed even earlier, so that words could be formed. Therefore letters are more fundamental and powerful than anything else a diviner could use to force the secrets of the universe into view. Now I’m going to ask you a question, Bibi Blair, and you must answer truthfully, frankly, because I’ll conduct the session in different ways depending on your response. Does Scrabblemancy make sense to you—not