“Here we are.” Lorna Lewis indicated a house. She might have been psychic at that; I couldn’t have distinguished this particular shack from any of the others. It was a wide two-story house which might once have been painted yellow. The shades were drawn, the door was shut, and the only sign of occupancy was a smear of cat droppings across the broken boards of the porch.
We parked, then swerved across the sidewalk in single file. I stumbled over a battered blue coaster wagon which lay on its side near the fence. Right then and there I almost forgot my vow of silence.
I fancied I saw the shades move slightly in a window to the left of the porch, but I was more interested in the movement of Lorna Lewis’s peach-colored slacks. We followed her up the porch steps.
She pressed the buzzer and a sour whine echoed from within the house. A sallow-faced Mexican girl opened the door. She brushed the perspiration from her mustache, wiped her hand on her stringy hair and said, “Yes, please?”
“We’ve come to see Mrs. Hubbard. We have an appointment.”
“I tell her. Wait here.”
She ushered us into the hallway and left us there.
The hall was dark and narrow, like a closet. And like a closet, it smelled of mothballs and mustiness. There were doors on either side of the hallway, and the girl departed through one at our right. Nothing supernatural about that—she opened the door before entering.
We settled down in wicker chairs and waited. My chair was next to a wicker end table piled high with tattered magazines. I picked one up. It was a copy of
Lorna Lewis found another cigarette. The Professor polished his monocle. I looked at “gag” still-shots of such forgotten cinema zanies as Harry Langdon, Jimmy Finlayson, Andy Clyde and Edgar Kennedy.
The silence was emphatic. The air was hotter, mustier. The hall became an oversized coffin. Time passed, but what’s time when you’re inside a coffin? Lorna Lewis stepped on her cigarette. The Professor adjusted his monocle. I sat there listening to the worms bore through the woodwork.
Then the door opened, and we jumped, and the Mexican girl said, “In here, please.”
Beyond the door was an ordinary parlor—“sitting room” in the day when this house was built—filled with the usual scrolled oak furniture, upholstered by a contemporary of Queen Anne. The wallpaper was Paris green, obscured in many places by large chromos of the Saviour in meditation, exaltation and agony.
The center of the room was occupied by a “dining room suite” consisting of six chairs and a round table. Mrs. Hubbard sat in one of the chairs, her elbows on the table top. She wasn’t exactly Mrs. Hubbard—“Mother Hubbard” would be a more accurate tag. A fat, blowsy, red-faced woman in her mid-menopause, with pork-bristles on her arms and chin. Coarse brown hair nestled in a bun against the back of her high-necked black dress. There was something tragic about her deep-set eyes; here, if ever I saw one, was a woman who had been suffering. From a hangover.
“Greetings.”
Her voice was as big as her body. It bounced off the walls and exploded against our ears.
“You are prompt, Miss Lewis. And I see you have brought some guests.”
“I thought you wouldn’t mind. This is—”
“I know.” Mrs. Hubbard smiled slightly. “Please be seated, and I will endeavor to convince the skeptical Professor Otto Hermann, Ph.D., that I am indeed a psychic sensitive.”
We selected chairs and sat around the table. The Mexican girl opened the door again and ushered four more people into the room. We turned and stared at the fat little red-faced man with the mustache, the portly matron in the flower-print dress, the pale, bespectacled blonde girl, and the gaunt, gray-haired woman who fiddled with her coral beads.
Mrs. Hubbard, unsmiling, waved them to places at the table. The Mexican girl brought in some extra chairs and then produced a card table which she set up in the corner of the room. Mrs. Hubbard rose and retreated to a seat behind the card table and we sat around the larger one, facing her, in a semi-circle.
Nobody said a word. Lorna Lewis watched Mrs. Hubbard. I watched Lorna Lewis. The Professor was watching me. Mrs. Hubbard didn’t appear to be watching anybody. The whole affair began to take on the charm and jollity of an inquest. I was waiting for something to happen. I was waiting for the closing of the blinds, the whisperings in the darkened room, the rappings and the wailings, the screech of chalk moving across a slate, the phosphorescent phantom issuing from the mouth of a moaning woman.
The Mexican girl appeared again. She carried a tablet of cheap blue-ruled paper, a package of envelopes, and a handful of sharpened yellow pencils. This assortment made a nice little mess on Mrs. Hubbard’s card table.
We watched and waited as the Mexican girl rotated chunky thighs towards the door. The red-faced man fingered his mustache, the matron played with her purse, the girl with the glasses coughed, the gray-haired woman used her coral beads for a private rosary. The Professor had his monocle to divert him and I had Lorna Lewis. Her black hair held a living lustre. I wondered how it would feel to dig my fingers into those curls, press that head back, and—
“Will everybody take a pencil, a sheet of paper and an envelope, please?”
Mrs. Hubbard was ready to go into her routine. We rose, filed past the table and returned to our places.
“Because our group tonight is a little larger than usual, and because there is a natural reticence in the presence of strangers, I feel it best to have you put your questions in writing.” Mrs. Hubbard smiled.
“I suggest that each of you write down one question, to begin with. If we have time, I shall be glad to work with your further inquiries personally—and privately, if you wish.
“At the moment the important thing, frankly, is to gain your complete confidence. Without it you will have no faith in my power, nor in my ability to help you. Since some of you are here for the first time tonight, I’m going to make use of a rather spectacular method to convince you of my extra-liminal perception.”
The deep voice rolled smoothly, easily, persuasively.
“I’m not very much of a showman—I cannot offer you a dark room, table-tipping, ghostly presences. But if each one of you will write a question on a piece of paper, fold it as much as you like, and personally seal it in an envelope— then perhaps I can demonstrate an interesting psychic phenomenon.”
There was a pause, a shared feeling of hesitation. Mrs. Hubbard didn’t have to be a mystic to sense the indecision.
“Please. It’s very simple. I am going to read your questions back to you as you have written them, without opening the envelopes. There’s no trickery. You can examine the paper, the pencils, the envelopes. You won’t find any carbon or wax or acid-treatments. There will be no waiting and no switches. I’ll read your questions back to you immediately and give you the answers as they come to me. So if you’ll write—and make your questions sincere— whatever is closest to your mind and heart—”
The red-faced man scrawled something on his ruled sheet and folded it carefully four times. The matron licked the tip of her pencil and frowned. Lorna Lewis pouted. I watched her lips pucker as if seeking kisses—or bites. The spectacle suggested several questions to my mind, but not the kind I cared to have read back to me in public.
I shielded my own paper and wrote, “Will my new venture be successful?”
There was much business of folding and sealing. Lorna Lewis ran her tongue across the flap. She was like a kitten lapping cream. I wondered how it would feel to—
Then I stopped wondering. Mrs. Hubbard lumbered around the table and took up the sealed envelopes. I watched her for obvious reasons; we all watched. But I could detect no switch or sleight-of-hand. She collected seven envelopes, shuffled them carefully, and placed them on the table. She spread them out fanwise before her and frowned. Our chairs scraped back as we faced her. She switched on a lamp behind her and produced a wire filing basket.
“I shall read your questions and answer them one at a time,” she told us. “In order to confirm this, I am going to ask the writer of each question to raise his or her hand and let me know if I’ve sensed it correctly. Then I’ll open the envelope containing it. Is that agreeable?”
We nodded. I looked at Professor Hermann. His face was utterly expressionless. I wondered what he was thinking, what he would do if Lorna Lewis seemed convinced by Mrs. Hubbard. So far he hadn’t opened his mouth.
Mrs. Hubbard stared down at the envelopes. Her forehead creased. A fat hand reached out at random and lifted an envelope from the center of the fan-shaped assortment. She placed the sealed envelope high against her
