She didn’t hear a scream. The dining room remained silent, except for the pounding of her heart and the noise of the city traffic.
But when the hunched-up shadow tore off what looked like the smaller shadow’s head, she felt something. She was sure she felt something. A scream as white and as silent as a frozen window; but a scream all the same.
The hunched shadow changed shape. She couldn’t understand what it was doing at first, because it was dark and two-dimensional. But then she realized that it had turned around — and not just turned around, but turned towards her.
She backed away, two or three steps, then another. This was it. This was time to run. The shadow seemed to swell, as if it were coming closer. There was no sound, only the sensation of something approaching.
She was just about to snatch for the door when one of the dining room chairs dragged itself noisily across the floor, caught her just behind the knees, and sent her colliding against the bookcase. Another chair slid across the floor, then another. Then the table circled around, its feet making an ear-splitting screeching noise on the wood-block flooring, and struck her on the right side of her head, so hard that it almost knocked her out. She tried to struggle up, but the furniture pushed against her, harder and harder, all legs and arms and corners, pinning her against the wall as painfully and effectively as if it had been stacked on top of her.
She gasped for breath. The edge of the table was pressing so relentlessly against her chest that she thought her breastbone was going to crack. A chair-back wedged itself against her shoulder. She cried out ‘Help! Somebody help me!!’, but Freddie Benson was playing his own guitar in accompaniment to his CD player now, and all she could hear was the deep bass thrumming of Bruce Springsteen.
She couldn’t breathe. She felt one rib being pushed in further and further; and then something inside her chest made a sickening noise, halfway between a crackle and a wet sigh. She felt an intensely sharp pain, a pain that made her scream; and when she screamed she screamed out a fine spray of blood.
She felt the furniture bearing down on her harder and harder. She felt as if gravity were pressing her against the wall.
She shouted ‘Help!’ again and again; but she thought about all of those times when she had heard other women shouting in the Village — muffled cries of pain and despair — and how she had always ignored them. Other women’s agony hadn’t been her business.
She smelled that deep, sour smell, like a fetid well being opened up. She twisted her head around and saw to her horror that the hunched-up shadow was heaving itself silently towards her, huge-headed, beastly, a living nightmare fashioned out of nothing but darkness.
One
I could never understand why I always attracted old ladies so much. Old ladies have gushed all over me ever since I was knee high to a high knee. They kissed me, they cooed at me, they patted me so often I was lucky my head didn’t end up totally flat on top. They gave me dimes for candy, which I saved up and bet with at the track.
By the time I was nine I suppose it had become second nature to think that old ladies = money, just like e = mc2. I ran errands for them, mowed their lawns, painted their fences, all of that Tom Sawyer stuff. In return (apart from paying me) they taught me how to play the stock-market, how to cheat at bridge, and how to blackmail major food companies into sending you heaps of free groceries, all of that old lady stuff. Don’t you ever think that old ladies are innocent old dears: they have all day to sit and think of ways to rip off the system, and they do.
It was an old lady called Adelaide Bright who taught me the most profitable skill of all, however: and that was how to tell fortunes. Tea-leaves, crystal balls, star signs, tarot cards … she knew them all and she showed me how they were done.
The first thing she taught me was that tea-leaves and crystal balls and astrological signs are only a ritual, a little bit of hocus-pocus to impress your client. She was one of the best: but she demonstrated without a doubt that you can no more predict somebody’s future from the star-sign they were born under than you can predict when a tire is going to blow out from the time of day it was moulded.
Telling the future isn’t magic, it’s common sense. All you have to do is take a long shrewd look at your customer, come to some logical conclusions, and lie a lot. Oh — and charge a lot, too. The more expensive the fortune-telling, the readier your customers will be to believe you. After all, they’re going to waste 100 bucks on nonsense?
Adelaide taught me how to sum people up by the way they sat, the way they talked, their nervous habits, the way they laughed. Most of all, she taught me how to read people’s personalities by the way they dressed. Two women can be wearing the same outfit, but one of them can be wearing it because it’s the very best that she can afford, while another woman can be wearing it because — to her — it’s cheap and casual.
‘Look at their shoes,’ Adelaide used to remind me. ‘You can read volumes from people’s shoes. Are they new but dirty? Are they old but well-repaired? Are they Nike trainers or are they wingtip Oxfords?’
The only thing about which Adelaide was seriously superstitious was the tarot. She thought that the tarot was dangerously misunderstood; not to be played with; and much more powerful than anybody knew. She said the tarot was a window to a land which all of us could remember, but which none of us had ever visited — or would ever want to visit. I didn’t know what the hell she meant by that, so I smiled and nodded and listened to what she had to say about detective work.
Adelaide was almost like Sherlock Holmes, the way she could analyze people; and when it came to predicting what was going to happen to them, she was almost always spot-on. She even predicted that old Mr Swietochowska’s deli on Ditmas Avenue was going to go out of business, almost to the month, although I later found out that she had a nephew who worked for the planning department at Safeway, and he had told her a clear two years ahead of time that the company was thinking of building a new superstore on the waste lot right next door. But that’s what telling fortunes is all about. Observation, logic, memory and common sense. You can tell your own fortune if you’re honest about yourself, but not many people are.
Even Adelaide wasn’t. She smoked a pack-and-a-half of Salem Menthol every day, sometimes more when she was lonely. She said they couldn’t hurt her, being menthol. They kept her sinuses clear. On 15 March, 1967, she complained of chest pains and shortness of breath. On 11 April, she died of lung cancer at the Kings County Hospital Center and the only person who went to her funeral was me. It didn’t rain. In fact, it was hazy and uncomfortably hot, and I wished that I hadn’t worn my raincoat.
I can see her face today: clear as a photograph. White hair, wound in a knot; bright green eyes; skin like soft crumpled tissue-paper. She always put me in mind of Katherine Hepburn, romantic and girlish and strong, even at the age of 71. And she always gave me a saltwater taffy, and kissed me before I left.
Wherever you are, Adelaide, heaven or hell or tarot-land, God bless you.
It was a grilling August day and every window was open wide to let the heat in. My recently-departed lover had been friends with a very hip, black gang-leader called Purple Rayne who had sold me a ‘second-hand’ air-conditioner that still had ‘Avis Rent-A-Car’ stencilled on it. I didn’t object so much to the fact that it was stolen as I did to the fact that it hardly ever worked. When I did manage to get it going, it used to sound like a Mexican rumba orchestra practising La Cucharacha on the last train to Brighton Beach.
This morning I needed comparative quiet because I was telling the fortune of Mrs John F. Lavender, one of my most generous clients; and Mrs John F. Lavender was very demanding when it came to finding out what was going to happen to her next. This was because she was having affairs with three different men at once and she didn’t want any one of them to find out about the other; and in particular she didn’t want Mr John F. Lavender to find out about any of them.
My walk-up consulting rooms and living accommodation were on th
e top floor of a peeling three-storey brick building on East 53rd, above the Molly Maguire Club, where some of the less assimilated of New York’s Irishmen gathered of an evening to drink Bushmills Whiskey and sing about the old country and dance a few jigs and knock each other’s teeth out. The whole south side of East 53rd between Lexington and Third was in a state of dilapidation: a sorry collection of trellis-gated stores that had long gone out of business, interspersed with Cohen’s Cut-Price Drugs, the Pink Pussy Sex Center, and Ned’s Bargain Liquor. It directly fronted the gleaming new plaza underneath the Citicorp Center, like a hideous reminder that everything grows old one day, and that even the grandest dreams can collapse into dust. I managed to rent my premises for less than a hundred and fifty dollars a week because Citicorp were doing everything they possibly could to evict me and Ned and Cohen and the Pink Pussies and the Molly Maguires and tear the whole scabby block down. I think they were afraid we’d give their plaza some kind of architectural leprosy.
Mind you, cheap as my consulting rooms were, I’d managed to give them a certain occult tone. I’d been across to Seventh Avenue to see my friend Manny Goodman, and Manny had sold me three bolts of midnight-blue velour at cost, which I had nailed to the walls and decorated with stars cut from turkey-sized cooking foil. I still had my crystal ball from my old consulting room, plus heaps of dusty leather-bound books, which looked like ancient grimoires unless you looked too closely at the titles, Cod Fishing Off Newfoundland and The Girls’ Book of Lacrosse.
My latest acquisition was a phrenological bust, on top of which I had stuck a candle. I must say it looked pretty damned clairvoyant.
Mrs John F. Lavender was lying back on the velour-draped daybed and furiously smoking at the ceiling. ‘I had such a terrible premonition this morning,’ she said. ‘It was like icy fingers trailing down my back.’
I made notes. Icy — fingers — trailing — down — back. When I first started in the fortune-telling business, I used to wear a kind of occult hat and kind of shiny occult robes, but these days I found that the ladies liked it better if I wore a suit and shiny shoes and a carnation in my buttonhole and behaved more professionally — less like Merlin and more like a shrink. I also found that they paid me considerably more.
In a last attempt to be nice to me before her sense of humour ran out, my recently-departed lover had lettered me a very impressive certificate from the Institute of Chartered Clairvoyants, of Chewalla, Tennessee, which attested that Harold P. Erskine was a fully-qualified seer, licensed to soothsay in every state of the Union except Delaware. I don’t know why Delaware was excluded, that was just an authenticating touch that she’d invented. Either that, or Delaware simply doesn’t have a future.
Mrs John F. Lavender said anxiously, ‘I’m convinced that Mason suspects something.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Well … I was leaving Christopher’s building last Wednesday afternoon, and I was sure that I saw Mason in a passing cab. I’m ninety-nine per cent certain that it was him. He looked my way, and I think that he might have recognized me.’
If it had been Mason (who was lover number two, incidentally) I was convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that he would have recognized her, instantly. Today was one of her discreet days, and she was wearing a patterned silk shirt that looked like a schizophrenic’s painting of Miami’s Parrot Jungle, signal-red pedal pushers, and strappy red stiletto-heeled sandals. Her hair was dyed bright henna-red and tied up into a kind of firework effect on top of her head. She was fifty-two years old, with a dead white face, turquoise eyelids, double false eyelashes and a mouth like a strawberry flan run over by a fire-truck.
‘We’d better go over the cards,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you don’t have anything to worry about. Early Sagittarians are going through a very stable period right now … no disruptive vibrations. There’s a possibility that something you eat may disagree with you … it feels like tortellini. But apart from that, everything’s very calm. Almost cruise-like, you might say.’
I brushed bagel crumbs off my baize table-top, and laid out the cards. I didn’t use the tarot any more … not after all that trouble with Karen Tandy. I should have listened to Adelaide in the first place, I guess. But the tarot is a little like crack: you can’t really comprehend how dangerous it is until you try it.
These days I used Mile Lenormand’s fortune-telling cards. This is a very pretty pack of thirty-six cards which was devised by Mlle Lenormand early in 19th-century France. She used it to help her predict the rise and fall of Emperor Napoleon, the secrets of Empress Josephine, and the fate of many of their court followers. Or so the old shyster said — but then she was in the same business as me. What she really used was observation, logic and common sense. The cards were nothing more than a ritual. Unlike the tarot, Mlle Lenormand’s cards have a little rhyme on them which more or less explains what they mean. Like most aids to fortune-telling, the rhymes are sufficiently ambiguous to allow the quick-witted card-diviner (i.e. me) to be able to interpret them according to his subject’s immediate circumstances.
Mrs John F. Lavender noisily smoked while I laid out the cards, face up in four rows of eight cards and one row of four cards. ‘I don’t know what I shall do if Mason has found out. He has such a temper! I daren’t even face him! But then I can’t live without him, either. He has such a cute ass. I mean, cute asses are very few and far between, especially in men of his age. Most of them look like as if they’ve filled their shorts with three gallons of Jell-O.’
Mrs John F. Lavender’s key card was number twenty-nine, an elegant woman in a long green dress carrying a bouquet of roses. Personally I thought that number fourteen, the vixen, would have been more appropriate, but then I wasn’t being paid to be sarcastic.
‘Here we are,’ I told her, laying down the last of the cards. ‘This is you … with your roses. And right ahead of you is … ah.’
She blew smoke, and half sat up. ‘Right ahead of me is what? That’s a scythe, isn’t it? What does that mean?’
‘Well … strictly speaking the scythe isn’t altogether good news. It says here, “The scythe looms bare, danger stalks too. Of strangers beware, they can harm you.” ’
‘Danger? Of strangers beware?’ snapped Mrs John F. Lavender, her mouth contorted. ‘I thought you said my vibrations were calm. That doesn’t sound like calm!’
‘Wait a minute,’ I interrupted her. ‘It also says, “If some nearby cards hold a favourable view, Good are the odds you’ll overcome too.” ’
‘I still don’t like the sound of that “of strangers beware” stuff, Mrs John F. Lavender protested. ‘God, I have a difficult enough time bewaring of people I know!’
‘Hold on, hold on, let’s not be too hasty here,’ I told her. ‘Look, right next to you, on the right-hand side, is the clover-flower card. That means that even if something bad happens to you, you’ll soon get over it.’
‘But I don’t want to get over it! I don’t want it to happen to me in the first place!’
‘Well, for sure … but let’s take a look here, on the left. A letter, look — lying on a lace tablecloth. “This scented letter from a place remote … brings news that is better from a friend who wrote.” There … it looks like everything’s working out okay. The scythe card is just a warning, that’s all. It’s telling you to watch out for traps.’
I hadn’t read her the last part of the rhyme on the letter card, and I had no intention of reading it, either. It said, “But as dark clouds loom in threatening sky, Sadness will soon much intensify.”
Mrs John F. Lavender lay back on the daybed and fumbled in her pocketbook for her cigarettes. I leaned forward and lit it for her, and she breathed tusks of smoke out of her nostrils. ‘What kind of trap, do you think?’
‘Mason will follow you; or have you followed. That’s what I think.’
‘The rat! But I love him.’
‘Just be careful, that’s what the cards are telling you. Here, look at this one, underneat
h you. An open road. But there’s a warning, too. It says, “Beware of the ground sinking from within.” What it means is, take a different route when you visit Christopher, and when you visit Vince.’
‘Vance,’ she corrected me, ‘not Vince, Vance.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry … I lose track sometimes.’
‘I don’t have that many men in my life, thank you!’
‘I wasn’t trying to suggest that you did. But four’s enough to be getting along with, don’t you think?’
She sucked smoke down to her red-lacquered toenails. ‘Do you know what my dream is?’ she said. ‘To have them all in bed with me at one time. Can you imagine what it must be like to be taken by four men, all at one time?’
I frowned at the cards. ‘I’m afraid I don’t see that particular entertainment coming along in the foreseeable future. But — well, you never know.’
My intercom buzzed. I excused myself and answered it, while Mrs John F. Lavender took out her cheque-book and wrote out my fee. ‘Erm … it is fifteen dollars extra, for the Lenormand cards. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. They do take a considerable amount of psychic interpretation.’
‘Of course,’ she said, correcting the cheque. She signed it with her huge graffiti-like scrawl and waved it in the air to dry it
‘Hallo?’ said a tiny, distorted voice on the other end of the intercom.
‘Hallo, who is this?’
‘Is that Harry Erskine?’
‘That’s me. Erskine the Incredible — palmistry, card-divining, tea-leaf interpretation, astrology, phrenology, numerology, bumps read, sooths said. As recommended by New York magazine and Psychology Today.’
Mrs John F. Lavender gave me a furry wink of her double false eyelashes, and a wide suggestive grin, from which smoke leaked.
‘I read that piece about you in New York magazine,’ said the voice on the end of the intercom. ‘It said you were “the only so-called clairvoyant who made no secret of his fakery … either because he thought his clients were so gullible, or because he simply didn’t have the skill to make his crystal-ball gazing look convincing”.’
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