Thirteen Steps Down (19 page)

took the card from him, set the pack facedown onthe table and, taking

from a black velvet drawstring bag one piece of colored crystal after

another, black, translucent white,purple, pink, green, and dark blue,

arranged them in a circle,round a white lace mat.

"Place your hands on the mandala."

"What's that--what you said?"

"Place them inside the ring of stones. That's right. Now tell me which of

the sacred stones you can feel drawn closer toyour fingers. There will not

be more than two. Which two are drawing gradually toward you?"

Mix could neither feel nor see any movement of the stonesbut he wasn't

going to say so. He frowned and said in a very serious voice, "The white

one and the green one."

Shoshana shook her head. She had never been known to tel lclients

they were right. In fact, her policy being to undermine them and make

them feel ignorant, her popularity rested on the superior wisdom they

saw in her, contrasted with their owni nadequacy. "You are wrong," she

said. "The lapis and theamethyst are in your Ring of Fate today. Both are

pushing hard but your fingers are putting up a stubborn resistance. You

must slacken, cease to fight against them and bid them come."

The stones failed to move for Mix but he fancied a slightshift in the

stance of the gray-robed figure behind Shoshana's chair. The hand that

held the staff of twisted snakes had seemed infinitesimally to rise. He

meant not to speak of it, but he was frightened now and the words came

out.

"That thing--that man behind you--it moved."

"So you do have something of the inner vision," said MadamShoshana,

adding, "Just a hint of it. The stones have retreated now. Leave them."

Mix couldn't make out if she meant the wizard figure really had moved,

due perhaps to some mechanism inside it, or that he was possessed of

the same sort of imagination as hers. Hec lenched his fists to keep his

hands from shaking.

"Your fateful balance is badly awry," she began. "The stones speak of

self-doubt and suspicion, of fear that some sin will be discovered. Apart

from that, they are silent, keeping their own counsel. Now to the cards.

There is death in them." She lifted her head and stared at him

enigmatically. "I would avoid telling you if 1 could, but you drew the ace

of spades twice, and in theface of that I would fail in my duty if I did not

warn you of the danger of death. You also drew the queen of hearts and

she, as all must know, means love. I see a beautiful dark woman.

Shemay be for you or not for you, that I cannot see, but you will meet her

soon. That is all."

Mix got up. "That'll be forty-five pounds," she said.

"Will you take a check?"

"I suppose so, but no credit cards."

He had sat down again to write the check and had got as far as the date

when the original purpose of his visit came back tohim. "I wanted to ask

you about a ghost I may have seen."

"What d'you mean 'may'?"

"It's a murderer who used to live around where I live. He killed women

and buried them in his garden. I've seen someithing--I think. I thought I

saw his ghost in the house where

"That is where he killed these women?"

"Oh, no. But I reckon he used to go there sometimes. Would he--would

he come back?"

Madam Shoshana sat quite still, apparently lost in thought.After a full

minute, she spoke. "Why not? You had better come and see me again in

a week's time. By then 1Ishall have decided what should be done.

Remember, this will need the greatest care and spiritual protection.

Meanwhile, if you see it again, hold up a cross toward it. There is no

need to throw the cross, just hold it up."

"All right," said Mix, pleased he had the one Steph had given him. He

felt much more secure and doubted that he'd go back.

"That'll be another ten pounds."

Once he had gone, Shoshana lit a cigarette. Her next appointment

wasn't for half an hour. She was used to the gullibility of clients and no

longer marveled or even sneered at it, as she had done in her early days.

They would believe anything. She was herself a curious mixture of a

ribald derision of all things occult and a certain credulousness. That

small leaven of faith had to exist for her to follow her chosen path in life.

For instance, she had no doubt about the efficacy of water-divining and

the value of exorcism among other rituals. But she was fully in favor of

helping things along with practical aids. For instance, the pack of cards

she used consisted entirely of aces of spades and queens of hearts. She

had bought it from a jokeshop. The stones had belonged to her

grandfather who had collected them on his Oriental travels, and the

wizard figure was a reject from a junk shop in the Porto bello Road. She

had found it thrown in a skip on top of a nylon tiger skin and a portraitof

Edward VII.

But yet ... These "but yets" were not insignificant in her interpretation

of her vocation. The fortunes she told were based on nothing more than

her imagination and her observation of human beings. What the stones

did or the cards showed was irrelevant. Her ignorance of crystallomancy

was profoundand her knowledge of divination by cards nonexistent. Yet it

was strange, it was a little uncanny, how often her predictions came

close to the truth. Very likely, that young man would dieo r bring death,

or had already brought it, to someone else. As for the beautiful woman,

the streets of Notting Hill were full of them, he might bump into one at

any time. Another curious thing, though, was when she reached that

point in his fortune, Nerissa Nash had come into her mind and given rise

to that description, the beauty and the darkness. He had probably never

set eyes on the girl, except in pictures. As for the ghost, all that stuff was

rubbish, but if it was also a source of money, she saw no reason why she

shouldn't get her hands on it.

Writing

that

second

letter

to

Dr.

Reeves

was

almost

insurmountablydifficult. Several times Gwendolen gave up and wandered

about the house to stretch her legs and in a vain effort to clear her head.

It would be absurd and inviting ridicule to write to a man that he had

only dropped her because he thought she had had an abortion. She must

attempt circumlocution. She must somehow get around it. Upstairs in

her bedroom, gazing unseeing out of the window, she allowed herself to

dream of what it would have been like to have shared a bedroom with

him, to go to her wardrobe now and in the camphor odor that wafted out

when she opened the door, see his suits and summer raincoat hanging

close beside her own dresses. Itcould still happen. He was a widower

now.

She started up the stairs. All her life, since first she could walk, she had

climbed up and down them. The flight going upto the top floor hadn't

then been tiled but plain wooden boards covered in drugget. Whatever

had happened to drugget? Younever saw it anymore. Papa had had them

put down after the woodworm had been found and steps taken to

eradicate it. Few builders, including plumbers and electricians, ever

came to St.Blaise House. Exterior painting hadn't been done since before

the Second World War, no interior painting since eleven or twelve years

before that. But Papa had been fanatical about woodworm; worrying

about it kept him awake at night.

She could write to Stephen Reeves that she remembered his seeing her

in Rillington Place the day before they had met for the first time. Of

course she couldn't really remember, she didn't even know for sure if he

had seen her. If he hadn'the would think her very foolish, he might even

think she hadthat illness--what was it called? Alzheimer's--yes,

Alzheimer's disease.

Otto was sitting, sphinxlike, in the middle of the tiled flight. "What are

you doing there?"

She couldn't recall ever having addressed him before. Talking to

animals was ridiculous, anyway. Otto got up, arched his back and

stretched. He glared at her before leaping down one of the passages and

crouching in the shadows at the end. Gwendolen unlocked the door of

the flat and went inside. Everything was again depressingly neat. What

kind of a fanatic plumped up the sofa cushions before he went out in the

morning? The Psyche figurine on the coffee table she thought vulgar, the

kind of thing that came from furniture stores that sold cream leather

three-piece suites and molded Perspex tables. She picked it up, finding it

surprisingly heavy.

Its base was felted. It looked as if someone had put it down, surely by

mistake, into a pool of coffee. What else could have caused the dark stain

that covered half the base, turning the felt from emerald to maroon?

"The multitudinous seas incarnadine," quoted Gwendolen aloud,

"making the green one red."

She was rather pleased with the aptness of that. Macbeth, ofcourse,

had been talking about blood and Cellini's lump of marble had hardly

stood in a pool of that. The paucity of the book collection in here made

her shake her head. Nothing but works on that man Christie. Which

reminded her she had that letter to write.

Still, she must first visit the room next door to this flat and take

another look at that floor. Contrary to the way she remembered it, the

floorboard wasn't sticking up. Or not much. She must have imagined it,

tripped over something else. She stood, staring down at the splintery old

boards, and suddenlyshe knew what all the little holes were. They were

woodworm. Papa used to say woodworm were as bad as termites, they

could destroy a whole house. What was she to do?

Indecisively, she stood in the doorway, thinking once more of her letter.

She would make one more attempt at it, perhaps telling him obliquely

that no one should believe gossip-but surely she hadn't been the subject

of gossip? She couldn't tell him not to believe his own eyes. There was a

slight smell in the room she was sure hadn't been there when she last

came in. She would have noticed it. Not a pleasant smell, far from it.

Did woodworm smell? Perhaps. If it got worse, there was no doubt about

it, she would have to get a man in, get those people who did something to

floors and boards and furniture to banish the things.

When she had written her letter she would look them up in the phone

book. There was something called the Yellow Pages, and though she had

never opened it since it was left on herd oorstep, she would do so now.

Chapter 13

"Newfangled"

was

a

word

that

figured

predominantly

in

Gwendolen'svocabulary. She applied it to most things which, in another

favorite phrase, had "arrived on the scene" since the sixties. Computers

were newfangled, as were CDs and the means of playing them, mobiles,

answerphones, parking meters and clamping (though she enjoyed seeing

a clamp on animproperly parked car), color photographs in newspapers,

caloriesand diets, the disappearance of telegrams, and of course,the

Internet. In respect of most innovations, she managed to ignore them.

But the Yellow Pages was a book and with booksof any sort she was

familiar. Papa used to say that if he were insome isolated place with no

company and only the telephonedirectory to read, he would read that.

Gwendolen wouldn't goquite so far, but she didn't find this directory of

services as newfangled and incomprehensible as she had feared.

There were whole pages devoted to firms that treated woodworm .It was

difficult to know which to select. Certainly not afacetiously named one,

such as Zingy Zappers (Let Zingy Zapperszap your woodworm and dry

rot) or anything commercialr industrial. Eventually she chose Woodrid,

mainly because itwas near at hand in Kensal Green. This did nothing to

mitigatethe horror of failing to get through to a live human voiceon the

phone. She had to press key 1, then 2, did it wrong and had to begin all

over again. After she'd got over these difficultiesshe was asked to press

something called "pound" and had to ask for an explanation. When there

was no response fromthe automated voice to her inquiry she reasoned

that since itwasn't a figure or a star it must be that thing that looked like

acrooked portcullis. It was. She waited and waited while musicwas

played, the kind of newfangled music that thumped out ofcars being

driven by young men down her street on Saturdaynights. At last she was

through but was told, to her dismay, thata "representative will come and

make a survey" two weeks and four "working days" hence.

The phone call exhausted her and she had to lie down in the drawing

room for a rest and half an hour's read of The Origin of Species. Olive was

bringing her niece to tea. She had said both of them were on diets, but

Gwendolen knew how seriously shes hould take that. It just made things

more difficult, for they wouldn't want simply to drink tea but would

expect calorie free crispbread, low-fat cake, or other newfangled