The last thing I saw leaving town was the Eight of Cups barreling down on me. The crescent moon over the mountains, and the unnerving, maddening weight of the figure with the walking stick...

@Ginny Havafone got the worst of it. On her psychic dérive around town she uncovered them all, from The Fool to the the King of Pentacles. All the ones that weren't already in the Growlz Arcana. And in that menagerie of supersized mystical egos and aspects, Ginny lost her mind. Like poor @Shilpa108 before her, and @Ryan Gavins, and of course @gg Growlz.

When Ginny stumbled home to the dorms on Halloween night, literally mindlessly, they followed. The Hierophant, the Five of Cups, the Two of Wands, all the members of the Tarot Convention, towering above campus in their enormous psychic girth.

But I knew it was me they were after. The only one left they hadn't claimed. Me AND the book. Which is why I had to run. To save the school! To save everyone from the mindcrushing hugeness of the reality of the mentalities within the Tarot. The Unconventional Tarot Club had drawn these powers out, finding them in the world all around us. They felt our attention, and came through. To our side.

Which is why I hopped the train at the edge of town. Me and the book. To lure them away, and let all of you live without the burden of their attention.

It's better you don't think about them at all.

As the last person to see @gg Growlz before they went mad, I think it's important to share something.

gg had been doing tarot with anything and everything -- rocks, bottle caps, street names. It's like the whole world was becoming one big tarot deck to gg.

We were hanging out at the Keyhole. That's the cul de sac in the abandonded subdivision by campus. We would hang out there a lot after school, getting in touch with the infinite in gg's car.

"Shit! Here comes somebody!" I said. It was a woman in a black track suit walking her dogs. One was a wiener dog. The other was some kind of scary wolf hound.

"Just be cool," gg said.

The woman let them off their leashes and they took off in the field in front of us, barking and howling like crazy between a pair of unfinished houses.

"Hey there's a notepad in my glovebox. Can you hand it to me?"

On the cover of the notebook gg had scrawled GROWLZ ARCANA in sharpie. gg opened it and started sketching and scribbling furiously.

"Yeah, they're all around us. Right here in this town. That lady there? THE MOON."

The hairs on the back of my neck were rising. Like something was crawling up my spine.

"Yeah, I've been seeing 'em more and more," gg said. "They're coming out of the woodwork. Like some kinda convention. And I've got a ticket."

"A tarot convention?" I asked.

"THE tarot convention. The assembly. The conference. The full-on Tarot Congress."

"Huh. And you say you're going?"

"We're already there! You take my notebook and study it. You'll see what I mean." gg was getting pretty worked up.

"Sure, gg. I'll give it a good look."

So when they took gg away I guess I kinda saw it coming. But some of the stuff in this notebook... I'll bring it to the next Unconventional Tarot Club meeting if anybody wants to see it.

I got an unopened package of Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies out of a dumpster behind the Spoonbender. They’re those flat butter cookies with different chess symbols stamped on them. I’ll be doing Tarot readings with them in my dorm room all weekend.