Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

The room where Shoshana sat was like nowhere he had everseen before. It was very hot and, for the time of day, very dark.His sensitive nose smelled tobacco smoke. There seemed tohim something not only eccentric but actively unpleasant inpinning the curtains together with those great clumsy brooches.He tried not to look at the owl and, with an even more deliberateturning aside, at the wizard in gray robes positioned behindShoshana's chair. She herself he had expected to be a glamorous figure, skillfully made-up and svelte, as would befit theproprietor of a beauty spa. Little of her was visible but what hecould see was enough: wizened face and sharp black eyes peeringout of stormcloud-colored draperies.

"Sit down," she said. "Will you have the stones or thecards?"

"Pardon?"

"Am I to look into your future by means of gemstones orcards?" She frowned. "I suppose you know what cards are." She produced a greasy pack from a concealed pocket in hertopmost layer. "These things. Cards. Which is it to be?"

"I don't want my fortune told. I want your advice on ghosts."

"Fortune first," she said. "Take a card."

Uncertain whether he would be allright to dig into the pack, he took the top one. It was the ace of spades. She looked at it and then at him inscrutably. "Take another."

She had shuffled the first card he took back into the packbut still when he picked one it was the ace of spades. Even in the gloom he could see that her face had fallen. She looked like a woman who has just been told a dreadful piece of news, dismayed but still incredulous.

"What is it?" he said.

"Take another."

This time it was the queen of hearts. A faint smile touchedher lips. She 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.