Tarot Gift
An extract from Russell Lee's True Singapore Ghost Stories 5

About a year ago, a colleague of mine gave me a deck of tarot cards because I was interested in the occult and was pretty good at palm reading. She thought I'd make a good tarot card reader.
When I asked why she was giving the deck away, she said she didn't want to talk about it. I didn't give it any thought and took the deck home. I left it somewhere in my room and forgot all about it.
But since that day, my housemate June - we were staying in seperate rooms in the same house - told me she felt uneasy every time she was alone at home, as if there was a presence in the house.

She freaked out one bizzare night when, all alone in the house, she could not sleep. She decided she would wash the plates. Maybe that would help. When she turned the tap on, blood spurted into the sink.
She ran to her room and stayed there until I came home. She told me what happened.
We both went to the sink to look & saw the tap running - with clear water. She swore she had seen blood. We decided, for our own peace of mind, that maybe she saw rusty water instead and the water had now become clear.

Anyway a fortnight after I received the cards, I went off to Kuala Lumpur for an assignment & so was away for the whole weekend. When I came back on Monday morning, my friend said she had had a terrible night.

She had heard the sound of a guitar being played in my room & in a deep male voice grunting like a demon. It had gone on all day on Saturday.
I did have a guitar but no one was in my room at that time. She also said that my telephone rang several times at midnight, which was a really strange thing as I only had an extension of the main line in my room, not my own private line.
So how could my phone ring without her extension ringing as well?

My friend was convinced something weird was going on that she went back to her mother's house for the day. When she was there, her aunt, who was a psychic, told her an evil energy existed in our house and that it came from my room.
She told my friend to call me immediately & to check if there was anything new or strange near the window, where she felt the evil spirit was coming from.
My friend called me on Monday morning, shortly after I had returned, & told me all about her awful weekend. I said I would check & put down the phone. That was when I realised that the guitar was leaning against the window & beside the guitar, also underneath the window, was the deck of tarot cards!

I immediately took the cards down to my office & left it on my colleague's desk.
I didn't tell June about the deck. If she had really felt the presence, then she would know now, without being told, that the evil presence had gone away.

When she came home that night, she immediately said that the evil presence was gone and that she was no longer afraid. She went to my room & though she saw the guitar still there, she felt all right. She couldn't explain why & thought her imagination was getting the better of her.
Since that day June hasn't complained about feeling disturbed. I never did tell her about the tarot cards. I'm sure it would have freaked her out to know she was truly being bothered by an evil presence.

I confronted my colleague at work & asked her why she had given me such a tainted present. She said she thought I was strong enough to neutralise the cards. It seemed the cards had been owned by a murderer. Her father was a lawyer who represented the man. When the criminal was sent to jail, he gave the tarot cards to my friend's father, who had in turn given it to her.
She said she was tormented by horrible nightmares after that & she felt a heavy male body pressing down on her. Sometimes it would choke her & she would not be able to get up.
She gave the cards to me so that I could cleanse it of its evil. I was extremely angry & told her off for having put me in such danger.

Fortunately, I was made of tougher psychic stuff than my housemate. I told her never to pass the responsibility of those tarot cards to anyone else & to return it to its owner.

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