Brett Halliday - Dolls Are Deadly

“To the other world?” Shayne nodded toward the card.

“To the departed,” the woman affirmed in a voice as unctuous as an undertaker’s. “If this is your first time here I’d better tell you that we allow few questions-inside.” The faint pause before the last word and the drop in her voice gave full and relevant value to it. However, the reverence with which she pronounced the next words, “That’ll be five dollars,” took away some of the effect.

Dropping a five on the desk, the redhead walked past her into the next room. It was furnished like a doctor’s waiting room except that there were no magazines. The furniture consisted of benches on which three people might sit with only small discomfort, and straight wooden chairs. A round pine table in the center was bare except for an incense burner from which the sickening odor of sandalwood emanated. The only light came from a green-shaded lamp.

Shayne spotted Tim Rourke seated alone on a bench, bent over, his lean legs widely separated. His thin hands twirled his hat between his legs while he stared at the floor. Shayne’s eye flicked past the baggy coat pocket where the recorder might well be concealed, to Tim’s belt buckle which doubled for a crystal microphone.

On another bench Clarissa Milford sat, wedged between a man and a woman, probably her sister and brother-in-law, for the man wore a black mourning band on one sleeve. Clarissa gave him a faint nod of negation, and Shayne walked past her without speaking and sat down beside Tim Rourke.

The reporter’s emaciated face stretched into the thin smile he might give a stranger; he nodded slightly and went back to twirling his hat.

Putting a cigarette to his lips, Shayne spoke behind his hand in a barely audible voice and without looking at Tim. “You set with the pick-up?”

“Yeah.” Rourke’s lips hardly moved. “What you want taped?”

“The whole seance.”

Rourke nodded and Shayne fell silent. Where, he wondered, was Clarissa Milford’s husband? Since Dan Milford was the one who really believed in the seances, it was a little curious that tonight he should not be here. In the weighted silence, he studied Clarissa’s benchmates.

Her sister, Mabel, sat stiffly as if she were so tightly corseted that her spine was held rigid. Her shoulders were square and her wrists, where they showed below the sleeves of her black dress, were thin and bony. Her brown, straight hair was pulled back severely into a bun-not the chic bun Clarissa wore, but an old-fashioned braided twist. Had it not been for a formation of bone around the eyes and a fleeting expression at the mouth, Shayne would have found it hard to believe that the two could be sisters.

The man with the mourning band on the sleeve of his light gray suit looked shorter than Mabel. Except for the grim set of his mouth, Percy Thain would have been innocuous looking, but bereavement, rage and rebellion against the tragic death of his son were apparent in his face and in the bleak lifelessness of his eyes.

At ten minutes to eight two other couples entered-tourists, judging from their spruce vacation clothing-and, in their wake, another couple. Shayne’s knobby fingers massaged his left earlobe.

The man was the balding, angel-haloed man called Ed whom he had met on Sylvester’s boat that afternoon. His wife was about what Shayne would have expected; middle-aged and showing it, dumpy but trying to conceal it with tight corsets and high heels.

Above the white sport shirt Ed’s face loomed raw and burned. The fringe of hair was smoothed and stuck down with water, and he was chewing a thick cigar, perhaps one the Cuban had dropped on the Santa Clara as an afterthought. The belt holding his trousers circled below his pot-belly obscenely, but his suit was made of soft flannel and looked expensive.

Ed glanced casually around the dimly-lit room, doing a slight double-take when his eyes met Shayne’s. He nodded curtly and led his wife to one of the hard-backed benches.

It was hard to believe this granite-visaged man and the jovial, drunken Ed on the boat this afternoon were the same, and hard to conceive of Ed’s being interested in the occult. His wife might have forced him to come, but in spite of his wry claim this afternoon that his wife made him clean the fish he caught, he didn’t seem like a man a wife could dominate.

Three other tourists, all women, entered, gave everyone the stranger’s smile and sat down. Apparently in this society neither conversation nor introductions were in order. And curiously, though the out-of-towners were almost certainly in Miami on vacation and at Madame Swoboda’s only for amusement there was no laughing or talking. It might be the atmosphere, or the fact that they were about to explore, however shallowly, something they did not understand, which cast a pall of solemnity over them.

Another couple entered, and finally a lone woman, thin-faced and gray, clutching a large black bag. She, like the Thains and Clarissa Milford, looked like a regular. There was nothing of the vacationer about her.

At two minutes to eight the woman in the hornrimmed glasses picked up the cash box and walked down the hall. In less than a minute she was back, standing in the doorway.

“You may come in now.” Her voice was rarefied.

She stepped across the small hallway as the crowd rose, opened a pair of sliding doors and held a heavy black velvet curtain aside to allow them to file in.

Except for a pale green light emanating from a round ball, the room was dark. At the far end of a large oval table, the dim form of Madame Swoboda sat erect in an armless chair, hands flat on the table in front of her, one on either side of the green ball. The light shone up eerily into her face, emphasizing the caverns of her eyes and her high cheekbones. Her large, black-lashed eyes were open, fastened unblinkingly on a distant point ahead. She seemed already in a trance, unaware that anyone had entered.

She wore a silver shawl crossed over her bosom, which emphasized her full breasts, and a tiara-like circle on her ebony hair from which silver gossamer material fell in soft folds to her waist. Her features were regular, her skin clear and fair, her face beautiful and tantalizing. Yet underneath, despite her apparent removal from the world of reality, there was that fire Clarissa Milford had described. She was vital and earthy.

Behind her was a closed, unadorned cabinet between windows draped, like the sliding doors, from ceiling to floor in heavy black velvet. No sliver of light came through.

She remained motionless as they felt their way around the table, pulled out chairs and sat down. Shayne managed to sit beside Ed, his fishing companion of the afternoon. Mabel Thain was on the other side.

When quiet had settled, Madame Swoboda spoke, her voice weirdly monotonous in the dark: “Once more we journey… together we reach out… in unison we call…” The timbre of her voice was deep, intriguing, sexy, with only a faint, indefinable suggestion of a foreign accent.

“For those new among us… link your own thumbs. Link the little finger on each hand with that of the person beside you. The circle travels, never ending… Wait… wait… wait. The dead are inarticulate.”

There was a faint rustling as they found each other’s hands. Then a deep quiet settled in. Shayne was aware of Ed’s slightly damp fat finger on his right, and Mabel Thain’s thin, dry one on his left.

Again Madame Swoboda spoke. “For the success of our journey I repeat, three times, the Ninety-eighth Psalm: He hath done marvelous things. His right hand and His holy arms hath gotten Him the victory… He hath done marvelous things. His right hand and His holy arms hath gotten Him the victory… He hath done marvelous things. His right hand and His holy arms hath gotten Him the victory… ”