Tarot Cards as a Gateway to the Otherworld

Tarot cards function as a possible gateway to the otherworld when Amaia Salazar turns to Engrasi’s deck for guidance and encounters a reading that appears to repeat a warning from the previous year. The scene makes the cards more than a tool for divination: they are a threshold that must be approached by ritual and closed with care. Yet when Amaia mishandles that threshold, the resulting injury is tangible, while its cause remains uncertain.

The Deck and Its Ritual

Amaia is drawn to a small parcel of black silk kept behind the glass doors of a cabinet. Before Engrasi returns, she takes it down and unties it. The tarot deck feels warm in her hands, as if alive, and she hesitates over the decision to use it. Even so, she shuffles while turning over the evidence and unfinished hypotheses from her investigation, bringing the practical work of solving a case into contact with the deck’s older, more intuitive method.

The cards recall Amaia’s childhood lessons. She remembers their smooth feel as they slid between her fingers, their distinctive smell, and the ceremony Engrasi taught her for turning them over. As a child, she had chosen cards intuitively and felt she knew what lay on the other side before revealing them; once turned, their relations seemed to make a route forward appear in her mind. The reading therefore draws on a form of knowledge Amaia learned before her present investigation, one that she had once practiced with solemn confidence.

This time Amaia shortens the procedure as she did when young, selecting cards from the top of the deck. Engrasi arranges them in a cross while Amaia turns them over one by one. The shape of the spread and the act of revealing it are important to the scene: meaning arrives not from a single card in isolation, but through the relation between cards and the order in which they become visible.

A Reading Repeated

The spread alarms Amaia because it seems to reproduce, card for card, a reading made a year earlier. In that earlier consultation, Ros had laid out the colorful images of the Marseille tarot deck in the same positions. The chance of an exact repetition already seems remote to Amaia; the fact that the repeated reading also carries a dark warning makes the resemblance more disturbing. Engrasi, turning the cards, recognizes a danger in what appears before them.

The reading identifies an additional and more dangerous player: an enemy who has already appeared, is coming for Amaia and her family, and will keep demanding her attention until she agrees to take part in the enemy’s game. Amaia asks what this threat wants. When the next card is turned, a bare skeleton looks up from it, and the answer is that it wants her bones. Engrasi repeats the warning, while the earlier version of the same words, spoken by Ros in the remembered reading, reaches Amaia as an echo from the past. The doubled voice binds the present consultation to its predecessor and makes the threat seem persistent rather than newly discovered.

Amaia responds with anger. She gathers the cards into a pack and throws it across the room; it strikes the mantelpiece and scatters in front of the fireplace. Afterward she stays still, watching some face-up cards draw her attention even as she feels revulsion and anger. She reproaches herself for falling into the old trap of trying to get ahead of fate. Her reaction captures the tension at the center of the reading: she seeks knowledge, but resents the possibility that seeing a warning may involve her in what it predicts.

Engrasi’s Rule About the Door

Engrasi’s teaching gives the tarot its governing image. The cards are a door, she has taught Amaia, and a door should not be opened without purpose or left open after use. The danger is not the door itself but whatever might come through it. A consultation may reveal what needs to be known, while what remains dark belongs to darkness; when the reading ends, the door must be closed. The lesson treats divination as a bounded act with a beginning and an end, not as permission to pursue every hidden thing.

The rule also changes the significance of Amaia’s thrown cards. Her anger interrupts the reading physically, but scattering the deck does not immediately restore order. She must collect the cards and make sure every one has been recovered. The episode thus gives practical form to the instruction to close the door: after the consultation has been disrupted, Amaia still has to gather and count what she opened. Engrasi watches her, and Amaia thinks her aunt looks afraid, making the rule feel like a response to genuine apprehension rather than a mere formality.

The Missing Card and the Burn

Amaia counts fifty-six minor arcana and expects twenty-two major arcana, but finds only twenty-one. The missing card has lodged on its edge inside the fireplace. Because the fire has fallen considerably, the card is not in danger of burning. Amaia uses the fire tongs hanging on the wall to retrieve it, sets it face down on the floor, then takes it in her hand to rejoin the deck.

As she does, pain shoots through her arm and across her chest. At first she is convinced she is having a heart attack; the pain is so severe that she thinks she is about to die. Engrasi sobs and bends over her, but Amaia realizes that the worst pain is concentrated at the tips of her thumb and index finger, where she is still gripping the card. When she carefully pulls it free, part of her skin remains stuck to its glossy cardboard cover, leaving two distinct fingerprints. The pain stops at once. After she holds her hand under cold running water, it appears to be in good condition apart from a faint tingling in the fingertips.

Engrasi connects this injury to an earlier episode at Juanitaenea, where Amaia touched the cradle in the attic and her tendons contracted as if they had all been cut at once. The comparison makes the burn a recurrence rather than an isolated mishap, but the scene does not settle what caused either experience. The cards’ apparent warmth and the sudden injury strengthen the possibility that the deck is more than an ordinary object; the precise cause, however, remains unresolved. The tarot’s gateway image therefore rests on a deliberate tension between ritual belief, remembered intuition, and bodily evidence that Amaia and Engrasi cannot explain.