(1989) Dreamer (24 page)

She walked back slowly, crying with misery, helplessness, shame, guilt. Guilt. Guilt. Scaredy cat, scaredy cat, could have saved her! Could have saved her! Could have saved her!

Her.

She’d been talking to her only minutes before.

It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. It had to be a—

She blundered in through the office door and knocked Drummond, who was coming out, flying. The box he was carrying fell to the ground with a sharp crack and rolled into the gutter. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’

She walked past Ken’s waxwork – the arm had been glued back on although the angle looked odd – and up
to her office. She sat back at her desk and put the wet and soggy paper down and stared again at the photograph, then the words, then the photograph again.

A thirty-seven-year-old mother of a young child was brutally raped and murdered at Hampstead Underground Station last night.

Tanya Jacobson, a psychotherapist, was found dead in a boiler room halfway down the notoriously deep stairwell shortly after ten o’clock by a maintenance electrician. Ticket clerk, John Barker, had warned Mrs Jacobson earlier that the lifts were out of service and that the steps went very deep.

Premonitions, precognition . . . that’s all a little bit – fringe, OK? We’re trying here to really connect with our dreams, go with them, free associate, get some good dynamics going
.

She looked up and saw Claire watching her. ‘I know her,’ Sam said bleakly. ‘I was with her just – before – she was . . . I went to this—’

The dark room. Knickers being ripped down. Hands around the neck. The stench of onions.

Tell me you love me.

Cunt bitch.

No. Please, no. Don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me – I have a child – please—

Sam felt an icy coldness torrenting through her, deep inside. She closed her eyes then opened them again. ‘It must have been minutes—’ She paused. ‘I could have prevented it,’ she said.

Claire looked up at her, and frowned.

Sam thought again of the grunting, and the dark shadow that came up the stairs towards her. ‘I ought to call the police,’ she said. ‘Tell them I was there.’

‘Did you see anything?’

‘Yes – I . . . I don’t know,’ she sighed.

She stood up abruptly and wandered around the office, clenching her hands. She walked over to the window and stared out at the sheeting rain, at puddles, at awnings, at black umbrellas and at an old man who was sifting through the contents of a litter bin.

Dead.

Terrific. Wow! Wonderful. I’m Tanya Jacobson
.

Tanya Jacobson. Sam felt the coldness of the draught on her hands, and water from her wet hair running down her face.

Just don’t get sidetracked into those premonitions, Sam. We don’t dream the future – but we make connections. We meet our monsters
.

‘I dreamed it,’ she said.

Sam, dismissing a dream as a premonition is the easy route. I think you’re using that as an excuse not to face the real meaning of the dreams
.

Maybe it was the other way around? Were they using the psychology route to avoid facing up to premonitions?

Christ. There must be someone who—?

She felt the heat from the radiator rise up through the cold draught, as she continued to stare out through the window. ‘That clairvoyant you go to, Claire. Why do you go to her?’

‘Mrs Wolf?’

‘Yes.’ Sam turned around. ‘What do you go to her for?’

‘I go to her for guidance.’

‘Is she accurate?’

Claire swept her hair back with her hands and looked sharply up at the ceiling, as if the answer was written there. ‘Yes, she’s – very accurate. She’s very accurate indeed.’

‘Does she help you to understand things?’

‘She’s very good at . . . helping people to understand things.’

‘Would she see me, do you think?’

‘Oh yes, I’m sure she would. You can just go along. You don’t even need an appointment, although it’s best to make one. Wednesdays. She’s always there Wednesdays.’

The shop was in a narrow street in Bloomsbury. She could see the sign halfway along on the other side. ‘THE WHOLE MIND AND BODY CENTRE.’ It was painted blue, and she sensed weird vibes coming out from it even from this distance. She glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes early.

There was a smaller sign in the window of the shop, a stand-up card which she read when she got closer.

Another on top of a neat stack of pyramids proclaimed THE WONDER OF PYRAMIDS! There was also a row of rock crystals, several packs of Tarot cards, an assortment of books –
Realise Your Full Psychic Potential said one, Understand Magik
, said another – and a silver four-leafed clover charm bracelet wrapped around a sign which said THE PERFECT VALENTINE GIFT!

The interior of the shop was, like the sign, blue, with blue-tinted fluorescent lights throwing down harsh light across the shelves and the open floor. Designer occult,
she thought. She went inside and the feeling of hostility almost overwhelmed her. She wanted to turn and run – from the heat of the blue fluorescents and the smell of joss sticks and the glare of a woman who looked up at her from behind a half-dismantled cash register.

Was she Mrs Wolf?

Her red hair was pulled back tight across her scalp, her skin tight over her face, as if she’d been affected by some freak pull of the moon. She wore a black polo neck sweater which showed her nipples dearly, like two black spikes.

Sam turned away and looked around. There were several crystal balls on a shelf in front of her. A rack of meditation cassettes, more pyramids, astrological charts, shelves stacked with candles, some of them black, a pouch with several small stones laid on it, a display of herbal sleep tinctures, and all the time the smell . . . the joss sticks, yes, but something else, something weird. Seriously weird, she thought, the fluorescent lights burning down on her scalp like sun-ray lamps.

The woman was bent over the cash register, picking at it with a screwdriver like someone trying to get the meat out of a lobster.

‘Excuse me?’

The woman looked up. ‘Yes?’ It seemed to come out without her mouth moving, almost without a sound, almost as if she had imagined it. She felt strangely disoriented.

‘I have an appointment with Mrs Wolf.’

The woman skewered the cash register again. ‘Through the books. Downstairs.’ Without looking up this time; again the mouth had not moved.

Sam walked through to the back of the shop, past a stack of pocket books and hesitated at the top of the stairs.

Cut and run.

Don’t be silly.

Claire comes here. It’s fine. Maybe that woman just had a row with her boyfriend or something? Or her girlfriend? She went down a steep, narrow staircase into the basement, which was an extension of the books section. A man with a pigtail, dressed in black, was restocking the shelves. There were books all around, piled on tables, on shelves, in dumpbins. Past them on the far wall she saw an arrow pointing down a short corridor to a door.

‘Eva Wolf, Clairvoyant’, was handwritten in large script and underneath in smaller writing it said:

The door was slightly ajar and a guttural mid-European voice called out from behind it. ‘Is that Mrs Peterson? You are rather late. I have another appointment.’

‘No, I’m Mrs Curtis.’

There was a silence. ‘I don’t think Mrs Peterson is coming today. Come in, please. Come in.’

Sam pushed open the door and went into a room that wasn’t much bigger than a toilet cubicle. The bare brick walls were painted the same blue as everywhere else and a single blue light bulb hung overhead. The room smelt faintly of joss sticks and strongly of a noxiously sweet perfume. Mrs Wolf was seated behind a tiny round table, which she dwarfed, wearing a dark polo neck sweater and an unfastened afghan waistcoat. She sat bolt upright, a tall, heavy-boned woman in her
early-seventies, her stiff face daubed with gaudy make-up, and poker-straight wiry grey hair that hung down around it and over her forehead in a fringe. Her eyes stared at Sam from their shadowy sockets, like wary creatures of the deep.

‘Please shut the door behind you. Put your coat on the hook.’

Sam did so and sat down. The woman took her hand quickly, snatchily, like a bird taking food, and held it firmly in her own large hand; it was hard, calloused, as if she spent her spare time digging potatoes, and her nails were unvarnished and had dirt underneath them. There was an old Bible on the table, wrapped in cracked cellophane, and a coffee cup with lipstick on the rim.

The woman stared at her, as if she had been expecting something quite different and Sam felt awkward, too close, as if her personal space was being invaded.

‘It was a sitting you wanted?’

‘What I really want is – just to talk. I want some advice . . . I’ll pay for your time.’

The woman did not react. ‘You’ve half an hour. You may make what use of it you like.’

They sat in silence for a moment and Sam felt increasingly uncomfortable. She heard footsteps upstairs and the faint sound of an extractor fan; she looked at the woman’s stiff, serious face and saw she had two warts, and a mole with a hair growing out of it. The face seemed to stiffen even more and slowly, almost imperceptibly, she began to quiver; Sam felt her hand trembling.

‘I’ve been having what I suppose are premonitions . . . in my dreams. It started a couple of weeks ago. I—’ She heard her own voice tailing away. What did she want to hear? she thought suddenly. Why had she come here at all? She felt a rising surge of fear inside her.

Stay away from the hokum guys
.

‘I was hoping you might help me to understand why these are happening.’

Mrs Wolf was giving her the distinct impression that she wasn’t really interested. ‘That would be the spirits telling you things.’

‘Spirits?’

‘It all comes from the spirits.’

‘Ah.’

‘It’s all part of God’s love for us.’

‘Ah.’

Mrs Wolf’s expression mellowed; she leaned forward and patted the Bible tenderly, affectionately, as if it was a baby she had just been suckling. ‘The Good Lord is always watching over us; He doesn’t mind if you are Christian or Jewish, because there is room for everyone in the Kingdom of God.’ She smiled a distant, private smile. ‘He still understands and He tells me to tell you that He’s keeping room for you. Any time you want to enter into Him He will receive you.’

Very reasonable of Him.

‘Kindness. He’s so full of kindness. Kindness and love.’

‘That’s why he killed my parents.’

‘He’s asking us to say a prayer together. A little prayer for protection and understanding and then we’ll say the Lord’s Prayer.’

The clairvoyant closed her eyes and held Sam’s hand a little tighter. Too tight; she was crushing it.

‘Gracious Spirit, as we join together here, we ask for blessing upon all of those who come from Spirit to be with us and we ask a blessing, please, for Mrs Curtis. Now, Father, we ask for protection and we know that when we come to Thee, as we stand in Thy grace, we are indeed protected from all of earth’s conditions. If we
could come to You more often, we would find that peace and tranquillity that exists only in Your presence . . .’ There was no feeling of sincerity in the woman’s words; she could have been reading from a telephone directory. It was almost as if she was . . . mocking?

Claire believed this woman? Swore by this woman?

Give her a chance.

‘Amen.’ The clairvoyant stared hard at Sam.

‘Amen,’ Sam said, half under her breath.

The woman’s hand was cold. Uncomfortably cold; how could she be that cold?

‘I’m getting a connection with advertising. Would you understand that?’

You know that. I told you when I made the appointment that Claire had recommended me. ‘Yes,’ Sam said.

‘I’m being shown two people in Spirit – could be your grandparents. No, they’re younger. Could they be your parents?’

Sam frowned.

‘Died when you were quite young, did they?’

Had Claire told her this?

‘I’m being told there was a break in your career – a young child involved – but that was in the past?’

Sam nodded, reluctantly.

‘I see difficulties with a man at the moment. This is a very ambitious man, and I’m shown his heart being torn. Pulled in two directions. I don’t know if it’s between you and work, or between you and another woman. Does that mean anything?’

Sam nodded again.

She tightened her icy grip on Sam’s hand even more, so much that Sam winced, but the woman ignored her, closed her eyes tightly and started breathing in hard,
short bursts. Sam stared, her hand in agony, and to her horror saw sweat beginning to pour down the woman’s face. She wondered if this was a trance.

RAPED AND MURDERED ON THE UNDERGROUND.

Last night she had lain in bed reading until she was too tired even to turn the pages any more. She had felt herself going down the dark steps, waiting for the shadow, and when she finally saw it and had turned to run, she had not been able to move, and had stood and screamed. Then Richard had grunted and asked her if she was OK.

No, damn you. I am not O.K. And you don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe that I was down there, down the tube station, minutes before it happened.

Had a lucky escape didn’t you, Bugs?

That was all he’d said. Big grin on his face.

He thought it was funny?

Mrs Wolf’s eyes opened and they were filled with a strange, uncomprehending fear. They closed again and she was still drawing short, almost desperate, breaths. She spoke slowly, almost as if she was sleeptalking. ‘Do – you – know – a – man – with – only – one—’ Then the panting started again, and the woman began shaking her head from side to side and whimpering, ‘No – no – no – no—’