Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

To stop himself repeating over and over, I killed a deadwoman, I killed a dead woman, he turned his thoughts to the problem of where Gwendolen was supposed to have gone. There was no way they could prove she hadn't gone, no way they could discover where she had or had not gone. Those two old women would soon grow tired of speculating about her. The house would remain empty for a while but for himself. He'd have no rent to pay in old Chawcer's absence and he'd stay where he was just until he'd become Nerissa's boyfriend.

There seemed no impediments now to getting to know her properly. She had always been so nice to him that she was probably waiting for him to come and see her, she might evenbe disappointed that he hadn't come yet and was thinking he'dl et her down. He'd go over to Campden Hill today. Thus he reassured himself.

It was two in the morning now. He anointed his back withthe anti-inflammatory preparation the pharmacist had recommendedand felt the glowing warmth it produced spread through his muscles. He took two ibuprofen, stripped off his clothes and lay on his bed, thinking, I killed a woman who was already dead.

Although she had resolved on the night of Darel's party that she would never go near a fortune-teller again, that it was obvious nonsense and she should never have fallen for it, everyone said so, Nerissa was again consulting Madam Shoshana. It would be the last time, she was determined on that, but she hadto have the soothsayer's opinion on whether or not she had achance with him. Before she went out she tidied her bedroom, putting used tissues and scraps of cotton wool into the wastebasket, picking up discarded garments and dropping them intothe linen bin. She even pulled back the quilt to air sheet and mattress before Lynette came to make the bed. Downstairs everywhere was already tidy. It was a dreadful chore and it wore her out but as she took dirty glasses into the kitchen, she thought how approving Darel would be when at last he camehere, that he'd think how suited she was to be his girlfriend and even what a wonderful wife she'd make.

Johnny Cash and the girl who loved the boy next door who worked at the candy store had been put away. The CD, currently on the player was Dvorak. Two new books from Hatchard's, one on European politics in the post-Cold War period and the other called The Case Against the Occult , lay on the coffee table, from which everything else had been cleared away. If only he would come and see the civilized, even intellectual,milieu in which she lived!

Fear of again meeting Mix Cellini on the stairs at the spa troubled her during her drive to Westbourne Grove. She hadput on baggy jeans and a gray sweatshirt because she knewthese clothes did nothing to flatter her, and she hadn't made upher face. Still, it hadn't escaped her notice that makeup does very little for a black woman who is already beautiful. Her dad even said-of course he would-that she looked better without it. She just had to hope it wouldn't be Cellini's day for doing whatever he did to the spa's machines. If she had to see him she wanted it to be in Campden Hill Square, where she'd at least have a reason for phoning Darel. In the event she got up those stairs without an encounter of any kind. She knocked on the door and the unprecedented happened. Shoshana asked her to wait one minute. Take a seat and wait just a minute. She noticed from her watch that she was two minutes early. Learning to be punctual was also part ofthe Darel-pleasing drive. Unless she had sat on the floor there was nothing on that tiny landing to sit on, so Nerissa stood, thinking about Darel Jones and her new Face of 2004 job and a photo shoot for Vogue and Darel Jones and the books shemeant to read to please him. Then Madam Shoshana called,"Come," in her low, thrilling voice.

She had asked Nerissa to wait because the girl was early for once, and when she knocked on the door Shoshana had been busy with Hecate's spine-crippling spell. She had renewed it once and now decided it was time to call a halt. Not because she had any pity for Mix Cellini, but due to her own frugality.The spell could be re-used four times; she had only done the business twice and who knew when someone else would come along that Shoshana would think desereved a bad back? Afterall, she was going to have to pay for it. Just because no account had yet come in from Hecate, this didn't mean the witch wasn't going to charge her. Hecate was like those very upmarket doctorsor dentists who send in their accounts and give you a nastyshock months after their treatment has ended and you've forgotten all about it.

The table was still littered with the paraphernalia requiredby the spell. Not exactly eye of newt and toe of frog but severalvessels of distilled water, a phial of sulphuric acid, and one ofpregnant woman's urine-sometimes difficult to get, that one, but Kayleigh, who was living with Abbas Reza and expecting his child, had happily produced it-a jar of bicarbonate of sodaa nd a bottle of green ink. Not that she was going to use any of it, he had had his two weeks of pain, but she had to throw the urine away, restore the bicarb to the cupboard where it belonged,and put the sulphuric acid back in its ribbed green bottle.All this must be put away before Nerissa came in and the gemstones were laid out instead.

Nerissa had always been in awe of Madam Shoshana. She was more than a little afraid of her and she disliked the wizard and the owl, the dirt (though not the untidiness) repelled her, and Shoshana herself was possessed of an ugliness that made her shrink. Today the soothsayer had got herself up in a feather-trimmed robe, grayish and bluish, and she wore a crestof black feathers on her head so that, to Nerissa, she looked like some evil bird of prey. Her clawlike hands played mysteriously above the ring of stones.

"When we've done that," Nerissa said tentatively, putting her hands inside the circle, "may I ask you something?"

"Why not ask the stones? Which ones do you feel drawing toward your fingers?"

Knowing very well that whichever she said she felt moving toward her, Shoshana would say she had picked the wrong ones, Nerissa said the first colors that came into her head.

"The yellow one and the mauve one."

"Really? I don't believe you are concentrating. Plainly, it'sthe blood-red carnelian and the pallid rose quartz that aredrawn to you today. Make your request to the carnelian."

"All right." The guests at Darel's party might have been gratified if they could have seen what a fool Nerissa thought she was, asking a piece of rock its opinion. But, blushing, she asked it. "There's a man," she began and faltered. She clearedher throat. "There's a man that I want to know, I want to getsome idea if he'll-well, if he'll ever love me."

Not surprisingly, the dark red crystal remained silent. Nerissa, feeling better now the words were out, almost giggled at the idea of its finding a voice. I wouldn't feel like laughing if it did though, she thought. Shoshana appointed herself its interpreter and Nerissa felt very unlike laughing at what she said.

"You will have to summon him. Call him and he will come. And then, when he comes, all will depend on how you speak to him. What you say then will determine your fate-for the restof your life." Shoshana looked up and met Nerissa's eyes.

"That is all. The carnelian has spoken."

The fifty pounds paid, for Madam Shoshana had put up her fee, Nerissa went back down the stairs, half afraid of encountering Mix Cellini. The only person she saw, waiting downstairs,the stairs being too narrow for two people to pass, was a woman and Madam Shoshana's next client.

The backache was still there when Mix woke up, but it had become subdued and dull, and the scratches on his ankle wer ehealing. He had slept well but for one bad dream. He showered, washed his hair under the shower, and dressed carefully, feeling much better, though unable to forget the dream. It had concerned his stepfather and his, Mix's, journey up to Norfolkto find Javy and kill him. This was something he had often fantasizedabout while still a child and hadn’t thought of for years.Javy had walked out on Mix's mother when Mix was fourteen and gone to live with another woman in King's Lynn or near it.But the desire to kill him in a painful way and watch him die in agony came back in the dream and when wide awake, as he now was, Mix saw nothing irrational or impractical in it. After all, he had killed two people (or thought he had) and got awaywith it, so there was no reason why he shouldn't kill a third.