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
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
